Short Packets over Block-Memoryless Fading Channels: Pilot-Assisted or Noncoherent Transmission?

We present nonasymptotic upper and lower bounds on the maximum coding rate achievable when transmitting short packets over a Rician memoryless block-fading channel for a given requirement on the packet error probability. We focus on the practically relevant scenario in which there is no \emph{a priori} channel state information available at the transmitter and at the receiver. An upper bound built upon the min-max converse is compared to two lower bounds: the first one relies on a noncoherent transmission strategy in which the fading channel is not estimated explicitly at the receiver; the second one employs pilot-assisted transmission (PAT) followed by maximum-likelihood channel estimation and scaled mismatched nearest-neighbor decoding at the receiver. Our bounds are tight enough to unveil the optimum number of diversity branches that a packet should span so that the energy per bit required to achieve a target packet error probability is minimized, for a given constraint on the code rate and the packet size. Furthermore, the bounds reveal that noncoherent transmission is more energy efficient than PAT, even when the number of pilot symbols and their power is optimized. For example, for the case when a coded packet of $168$ symbols is transmitted using a channel code of rate $0.48$ bits/channel use, over a block-fading channel with block size equal to $8$ symbols, PAT requires an additional $1.2$ dB of energy per information bit to achieve a packet error probability of $10^{-3}$ compared to a suitably designed noncoherent transmission scheme. Finally, we devise a PAT scheme based on punctured tail-biting quasi-cyclic codes and ordered statistics decoding, whose performance are close ($1$ dB gap at $10^{-3}$ packet error probability) to the ones predicted by our PAT lower bound. This shows that the PAT lower bound provides useful guidelines on the design of actual PAT schemes.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, journa

Ultra-Reliable Short-Packet Communications: Fundamental Limits and Enabling Technologies

The paradigm shift from 4G to 5G communications, anticipated to enable ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), will enforce a radical change in the design of wireless communication systems. Unlike in 4G systems, where the main objective is to provide a large transmission rate, in URLLC, as implied by its name, the objective is to enable transmissions with low latency and, simultaneously, very high reliability. Since low latency implies the use of short data packets, the tension between blocklength and reliability is studied in URLLC.Several key enablers for URLLC communications have been designated in the literature. Of special importance are diversity-enabling technologies such as multiantenna systems and feedback protocols. Furthermore, it is not only important to introduce additional diversity by means of the above examples, one must also guarantee that thescarce number of channel uses are used in an optimal way. Therefore, it is imperative to develop design guidelines for how to enable reliable detection of incoming data, how to acquire channel-state information, and how to construct efficient short-packet channel codes. The development of such guidelines is at the heart of this thesis. This thesis focuses on the fundamental performance of URLLC-enabling technologies. Specifically, we provide converse (upper) bounds and achievability (lower) bounds on the maximum coding rate, based on finite-blocklength information theory, for systems that employ the key enablers outlined above. With focus on the wireless channel, modeled via a block-fading assumption, we are able to provide answers to questions like: howto optimally utilize spatial and frequency diversity, how far from optimal short-packet channel codes perform, how multiantenna systems should be designed to serve a given number of users, and how to design feedback schemes when the feedback link is noisy. In particular, this thesis is comprised out of four papers. In Paper A, we study the short-packet performance over the Rician block-fading channel. In particular, we present achievability bounds for pilot-assisted transmission with several different decoders that allow us to quantify the impact, on the achievable performance, of imposed pilots and mismatched decoding. Furthermore, we design short-packet channel codes that perform within 1 dB of our achievability bounds. Paper B studies multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with short packets. We provide an achievability bound on the average error probability over quasistatic spatially correlated Rayleigh-fading channels. The bound applies to arbitrary multiuser settings, pilot-assisted transmission, and mismatched decoding. This makes it suitable to assess the performance in the uplink/downlink for arbitrary linear signal processing. We show that several lessons learned from infinite-blocklength analyses carry over to the finite-blocklength regime. Furthermore, for the multicell setting with randomly placed users, pilot contamination should be avoided at all cost and minimum mean-squared error signal processing should be used to comply with the stringent requirements of URLLC.In Paper C, we consider sporadic transmissions where the task of the receiver is to both detect and decode an incoming packet. Two novel achievability bounds, and a novel converse bound are presented for joint detection-decoding strategies. It is shown that errors associated with detection deteriorates performance significantly for very short packet sizes. Numerical results also indicate that separate detection-decoding strategies are strictly suboptimal over block-fading channels.Finally, in Paper D, variable-length codes with noisy stop-feedback are studied via a novel achievability bound on the average service time and the average error probability. We use the bound to shed light on the resource allocation problem between the forward and the feedback channel. For URLLC applications, it is shown that enough resources must be assigned to the feedback link such that a NACK-to-ACK error becomes rarer than the target error probability. Furthermore, we illustrate that the variable-length stop-feedback scheme outperforms state-of-the-art fixed-length no-feedback bounds even when the stop-feedback bit is noisy

Short Codes with Mismatched Channel State Information: A Case Study

The rising interest in applications requiring the transmission of small amounts of data has recently lead to the development of accurate performance bounds and of powerful channel codes for the transmission of short-data packets over the AWGN channel. Much less is known about the interaction between error control coding and channel estimation at short blocks when transmitting over channels with states (e.g., fading channels, phase-noise channels, etc...) for the setup where no a priori channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, we use the mismatched-decoding framework to characterize the fundamental tradeoff occurring in the transmission of short data packet over an AWGN channel with unknown gain that stays constant over the packet. Our analysis for this simplified setup aims at showing the potential of mismatched decoding as a tool to design and analyze transmission strategies for short blocks. We focus on a pragmatic approach where the transmission frame contains a codeword as well as a preamble that is used to estimate the channel (the codeword symbols are not used for channel estimation). Achievability and converse bounds on the block error probability achievable by this approach are provided and compared with simulation results for schemes employing short low-density parity-check codes. Our bounds turn out to predict accurately the optimal trade-off between the preamble length and the redundancy introduced by the channel code.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC 2017

Low-Complexity Joint Channel Estimation and List Decoding of Short Codes

A pilot-assisted transmission (PAT) scheme is proposed for short blocklengths, where the pilots are used only to derive an initial channel estimate for the list construction step. The final decision of the message is obtained by applying a non-coherent decoding metric to the codewords composing the list. This allows one to use very few pilots, thus reducing the channel estimation overhead. The method is applied to an ordered statistics decoder for communication over a Rayleigh block-fading channel. Gains of up to $1.2$ dB as compared to traditional PAT schemes are demonstrated for short codes with QPSK signaling. The approach can be generalized to other list decoders, e.g., to list decoding of polar codes.Comment: Accepted at the 12th International ITG Conference on Systems, Communications and Coding (SCC 2019), Rostock, German

Digital communications over fading channels

In this report, the probabilities of bit error for the most commonly used digital modulation techniques are analyzed. Analytic solutions are developed for the probability of bit error when the signal is affected by the most commonly encountered impairment to system performance for a wireless channel, the transmission of the signal over a fading channel. In this report, the effect of a slow, flat Ricean fading channel on communications systems performance is examined. Since channel fading significantly degrades the performance of a communication system, the performance of digital communication systems that also use forward error correction channel coding is analyzed for hard decision decoding and, where appropriate, for soft decision decoding. Diversity, another technique to mitigate the effect of fading channels on digital communication systems performance, is also discussed. Also included is a discussion of the effect of narrowband noise interference, both continuous and pulsed, on digital communication systems. We then discuss the analysis of the probability of bit error for the combination of error correction coding and diversity. Following this, we briefly discuss spread spectrum systems. Next, we examine the link budget analysis and various models for channel loss. Finally, we examine in detail the second generation digital wireless standard Global System for Mobile (GSM).Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Capacity -based parameter optimization of bandwidth constrained CPM

Continuous phase modulation (CPM) is an attractive modulation choice for bandwidth limited systems due to its small side lobes, fast spectral decay and the ability to be noncoherently detected. Furthermore, the constant envelope property of CPM permits highly power efficient amplification. The design of bit-interleaved coded continuous phase modulation is characterized by the code rate, modulation order, modulation index, and pulse shape. This dissertation outlines a methodology for determining the optimal values of these parameters under bandwidth and receiver complexity constraints. The cost function used to drive the optimization is the information-theoretic minimum ratio of energy-per-bit to noise-spectral density found by evaluating the constrained channel capacity. The capacity can be reliably estimated using Monte Carlo integration. A search for optimal parameters is conducted over a range of coded CPM parameters, bandwidth efficiencies, and channels. Results are presented for a system employing a trellis-based coherent detector. To constrain complexity and allow any modulation index to be considered, a soft output differential phase detector has also been developed.;Building upon the capacity results, extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts are used to analyze a system that iterates between demodulation and decoding. Convergence thresholds are determined for the iterative system for different outer convolutional codes, alphabet sizes, modulation indices and constellation mappings. These are used to identify the code and modulation parameters with the best energy efficiency at different spectral efficiencies for the AWGN channel. Finally, bit error rate curves are presented to corroborate the capacity and EXIT chart designs

Low-complexity iterative detection techniques for Slow-Frequency-Hop spread-spectrum communications with Reed-Solomon coding.

Slow-frequency-hop (SFH) spread-spectrum communications provide a high level of robustness in packet-radio networks for both military and commercial applications. The use of a Reed-Solomon (R-S) code has proven to be a good choice for use in a SFH system for countering the critical channel impairments of partial-band fading and partial-band interference. In particular, it is effective when reliability information of dwell intervals and individual code symbols can be obtained and errors-and-erasures decoding (EE) can be employed at the receiver. In this dissertation, we consider high-data-rate SFH communications for which the channel in each frequency slot is frequency selective, manifesting itself as intersymbol interference (ISI) at the receiver. The use of a packet-level iterative equalization and decoding technique is considered in conjunction with a SFH system employing R-S coding. In each packet-level iteration, MLSE equalization followed by bounded distance EE decoding is used in each dwell interval. Several per-dwell interleaver designs are considered for the SFH systems and it is shown that packet-level iterations result in a significant improvement in performance with a modest increase in detection complexity for a variety of ISI channels. The use of differential encoding in conjunction with the SFH system and packet-level iterations is also considered, and it is shown to provide further improvements in performance with only a modest additional increase in detection complexity. SFH systems employing packet-level iterations with and without differential encoding are evaluated for channels with partial-band interference. Comparisons are made between the performance of this system and the performance of SFH systems using some other codes and iterative decoding techniques

Book Review: A Conceptual Review of “Digital Communication Systems”

(Author: Simon Haykin, 2014)Haykin, S. 2014. Digital Communication Systems.John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA.Available: <http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-EHEP001809.html>