  Polar codes were recently chosen to protect the control channel information
in the next-generation mobile communication standard (5G) defined by the 3GPP.
As a result, receivers will have to implement blind detection of polar coded
frames in order to keep complexity, latency, and power consumption tractable.
As a newly proposed class of block codes, the problem of polar-code blind
detection has received very little attention. In this work, we propose a
low-complexity blind-detection algorithm for polar-encoded frames. We base this
algorithm on a novel detection metric with update rules that leverage the a
priori knowledge of the frozen-bit locations, exploiting the inherent
structures that these locations impose on a polar-encoded block of data. We
show that the proposed detection metric allows to clearly distinguish
polar-encoded frames from other types of data by considering the cumulative
distribution functions of the detection metric, and the receiver operating
characteristic. The presented results are tailored to the 5G standardization
effort discussions, i.e., we consider a short low-rate polar code concatenated
with a CRC.
