Energy-Efficient Non-Orthogonal Transmission under Reliability and Finite Blocklength Constraints

This paper investigates an energy-efficient non-orthogonal transmission design problem for two downlink receivers that have strict reliability and finite blocklength (latency) constraints. The Shannon capacity formula widely used in traditional designs needs the assumption of infinite blocklength and thus is no longer appropriate. We adopt the newly finite blocklength coding capacity formula for explicitly specifying the trade-off between reliability and code blocklength. However, conventional successive interference cancellation (SIC) may become infeasible due to heterogeneous blocklengths. We thus consider several scenarios with different channel conditions and with/without SIC. By carefully examining the problem structure, we present in closed-form the optimal power and code blocklength for energy-efficient transmissions. Simulation results provide interesting insights into conditions for which non-orthogonal transmission is more energy efficient than the orthogonal transmission such as TDMA.Comment: accepted by IEEE GlobeCom workshop on URLLC, 201

Short-Packet Communications for MIMO NOMA Systems over Nakagami-m Fading: BLER and Minimum Blocklength Analysis

Recently, ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) using short-packets has been proposed to fulfill the stringent requirements regarding reliability and latency of emerging applications in 5G and beyond networks. In addition, multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access (MIMO NOMA) is a potential candidate to improve the spectral efficiency, reliability, latency, and connectivity of wireless systems. In this paper, we investigate short-packet communications (SPC) in a multiuser downlink MIMO NOMA system over Nakagami-m fading, and propose two antenna-user selection methods considering two clusters of users having different priority levels. In contrast to the widely-used long data-packet assumption, the SPC analysis requires the redesign of the communication protocols and novel performance metrics. Given this context, we analyze the SPC performance of MIMO NOMA systems using the average block error rate (BLER) and minimum blocklength, instead of the conventional metrics such as ergodic capacity and outage capacity. More specifically, to characterize the system performance regarding SPC, asymptotic (in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime) and approximate closed-form expressions of the average BLER at the users are derived. Based on the asymptotic behavior of the average BLER, an analysis of the diversity order, minimum blocklength, and optimal power allocation is carried out. The achieved results show that MIMO NOMA can serve multiple users simultaneously using a smaller blocklength compared with MIMO OMA, thus demonstrating the benefits of MIMO NOMA for SPC in minimizing the transmission latency. Furthermore, our results indicate that the proposed methods not only improve the BLER performance but also guarantee full diversity gains for the respective users.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. This paper has been submitted to an IEEE journal for possible publicatio

Max-Min Fairness of Rate-Splitting Multiple Access with Finite Blocklength Communications

Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) has emerged as a flexible and powerful framework for wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the user fairness of downlink multi-antenna RSMA in short-packet communications with/without cooperative (user-relaying) transmission. We design optimal time allocation and linear precoders that maximize the Max-Min Fairness (MMF) rate with Finite Blocklength (FBL) constraints. The relation between the MMF rate and blocklength of RSMA, as well as the impact of cooperative transmission are investigated for a wide range of network loads. Numerical results demonstrate that RSMA can achieve the same MMF rate as Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) with smaller blocklengths (and therefore lower latency), especially in cooperative transmission deployment. Hence, we conclude that RSMA is a promising multiple access for guaranteeing user fairness in low-latency communications.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.0619