A second aspect provides a control information transmission method, and the control information transmission method may be performed by user equipment. Optionally, when receiving information sent by a network device, the user equipment obtains to-be-decoded information that includes DCI of the user equipment from the information. Optionally, the user equipment may obtain the to-be-decoded information that includes the DCI of the user equipment from the information according to a preset channel resource mapping rule. The to-be-decoded information carries a codeword obtained by the network device by jointly coding N pieces of DCI in a polar coding manner, where N is an integer greater than or equal to 2.
The user equipment sequentially decodes the to-be-decoded information, to obtain the DCI of the user equipment from the to-be-decoded information. Further optionally, after obtaining the DCI of the user equipment through decoding, the user equipment stops decoding, and performs a corresponding operation based on the DCI of the user equipment.
In a possible design, the DCI of the user equipment includes a cyclic redundancy check (Cyclic Redundancy Check, CRC) code formed by performing scrambling by using a preset identifier corresponding to the user equipment, and when the user equipment sequentially decodes the to-be-decoded information, each time one piece of DCI is decoded, the user equipment descrambles a CRC in the DCI by using the preset identifier corresponding to the user equipment.
Then, the user equipment checks an information part of the DCI by using a descrambled CRC, to be specific, determines whether the DCI is the DCI of the user equipment. If the check succeeds, the DCI is the DCI of the user equipment.