Polar Codes for Downlink Control Channels for Wireless Networks A technique is provided for decoding downlink control information that was encoded using polar encoding, the technique including: attempting, based on an initial assumption by a user device of a segmented downlink control information, to decode a first codeword provided via a user device-specific resource, the first codeword including a first downlink control information segment and a pointer to a second downlink control information segment of a segmented downlink control information; decoding, if the attempting to decode is successful, based on the pointer, a second codeword that includes the second downlink control information segment of the segmented downlink control information; and otherwise, if the attempting to decode is unsuccessful, making an assumption of a non-segmented downlink control information and decoding a third codeword to obtain a non-segmented downlink control information.