Tiny Codes for Guaranteeable Delay

Future 5G systems will need to support ultra-reliable low-latency communications scenarios. From a latency-reliability viewpoint, it is inefficient to rely on average utility-based system design. Therefore, we introduce the notion of guaranteeable delay which is the average delay plus three standard deviations of the mean. We investigate the trade-off between guaranteeable delay and throughput for point-to-point wireless erasure links with unreliable and delayed feedback, by bringing together signal flow techniques to the area of coding. We use tiny codes, i.e. sliding window by coding with just 2 packets, and design three variations of selective-repeat ARQ protocols, by building on the baseline scheme, i.e. uncoded ARQ, developed by Ausavapattanakun and Nosratinia: (i) Hybrid ARQ with soft combining at the receiver; (ii) cumulative feedback-based ARQ without rate adaptation; and (iii) Coded ARQ with rate adaptation based on the cumulative feedback. Contrasting the performance of these protocols with uncoded ARQ, we demonstrate that HARQ performs only slightly better, cumulative feedback-based ARQ does not provide significant throughput while it has better average delay, and Coded ARQ can provide gains up to about 40% in terms of throughput. Coded ARQ also provides delay guarantees, and is robust to various challenges such as imperfect and delayed feedback, burst erasures, and round-trip time fluctuations. This feature may be preferable for meeting the strict end-to-end latency and reliability requirements of future use cases of ultra-reliable low-latency communications in 5G, such as mission-critical communications and industrial control for critical control messaging.Comment: to appear in IEEE JSAC Special Issue on URLLC in Wireless Network

Data Transmission Over Networks for Estimation and Control

We consider the problem of controlling a linear time invariant process when the controller is located at a location remote from where the sensor measurements are being generated. The communication from the sensor to the controller is supported by a communication network with arbitrary topology composed of analog erasure channels. Using a separation principle, we prove that the optimal linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) controller consists of an LQ optimal regulator along with an estimator that estimates the state of the process across the communication network. We then determine the optimal information processing strategy that should be followed by each node in the network so that the estimator is able to compute the best possible estimate in the minimum mean squared error sense. The algorithm is optimal for any packet-dropping process and at every time step, even though it is recursive and hence requires a constant amount of memory, processing and transmission at every node in the network per time step. For the case when the packet drop processes are memoryless and independent across links, we analyze the stability properties and the performance of the closed loop system. The algorithm is an attempt to escape the viewpoint of treating a network of communication links as a single end-to-end link with the probability of successful transmission determined by some measure of the reliability of the network

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

Stabilizing Error Correction Codes for Controlling LTI Systems over Erasure Channels

We propose (k,k') stabilizing codes, which is a type of delayless error correction codes that are useful for control over networks with erasures. For each input symbol, k output symbols are generated by the stabilizing code. Receiving any k' of these outputs guarantees stability. Thus, the system to be stabilized is taken into account in the design of the erasure codes. Our focus is on LTI systems, and we construct codes based on independent encodings and multiple descriptions. The theoretical efficiency and performance of the codes are assessed, and their practical performances are demonstrated in a simulation study. There is a significant gain over other delayless codes such as repetition codes.Comment: Accepted and presented at the IEEE 60th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2112.1171

Near-capacity fixed-rate and rateless channel code constructions

Fixed-rate and rateless channel code constructions are designed for satisfying conflicting design tradeoffs, leading to codes that benefit from practical implementations, whilst offering a good bit error ratio (BER) and block error ratio (BLER) performance. More explicitly, two novel low-density parity-check code (LDPC) constructions are proposed; the first construction constitutes a family of quasi-cyclic protograph LDPC codes, which has a Vandermonde-like parity-check matrix (PCM). The second construction constitutes a specific class of protograph LDPC codes, which are termed as multilevel structured (MLS) LDPC codes. These codes possess a PCM construction that allows the coexistence of both pseudo-randomness as well as a structure requiring a reduced memory. More importantly, it is also demonstrated that these benefits accrue without any compromise in the attainable BER/BLER performance. We also present the novel concept of separating multiple users by means of user-specific channel codes, which is referred to as channel code division multiple access (CCDMA), and provide an example based on MLS LDPC codes. In particular, we circumvent the difficulty of having potentially high memory requirements, while ensuring that each user’s bits in the CCDMA system are equally protected. With regards to rateless channel coding, we propose a novel family of codes, which we refer to as reconfigurable rateless codes, that are capable of not only varying their code-rate but also to adaptively modify their encoding/decoding strategy according to the near-instantaneous channel conditions. We demonstrate that the proposed reconfigurable rateless codes are capable of shaping their own degree distribution according to the nearinstantaneous requirements imposed by the channel, but without any explicit channel knowledge at the transmitter. Additionally, a generalised transmit preprocessing aided closed-loop downlink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is presented, in which both the channel coding components as well as the linear transmit precoder exploit the knowledge of the channel state information (CSI). More explicitly, we embed a rateless code in a MIMO transmit preprocessing scheme, in order to attain near-capacity performance across a wide range of channel signal-to-ratios (SNRs), rather than only at a specific SNR. The performance of our scheme is further enhanced with the aid of a technique, referred to as pilot symbol assisted rateless (PSAR) coding, whereby a predetermined fraction of pilot bits is appropriately interspersed with the original information bits at the channel coding stage, instead of multiplexing pilots at the modulation stage, as in classic pilot symbol assisted modulation (PSAM). We subsequently demonstrate that the PSAR code-aided transmit preprocessing scheme succeeds in gleaning more information from the inserted pilots than the classic PSAM technique, because the pilot bits are not only useful for sounding the channel at the receiver but also beneficial for significantly reducing the computational complexity of the rateless channel decoder

Graded quantization for multiple description coding of compressive measurements

Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging paradigm for acquisition of compressed representations of a sparse signal. Its low complexity is appealing for resource-constrained scenarios like sensor networks. However, such scenarios are often coupled with unreliable communication channels and providing robust transmission of the acquired data to a receiver is an issue. Multiple description coding (MDC) effectively combats channel losses for systems without feedback, thus raising the interest in developing MDC methods explicitly designed for the CS framework, and exploiting its properties. We propose a method called Graded Quantization (CS-GQ) that leverages the democratic property of compressive measurements to effectively implement MDC, and we provide methods to optimize its performance. A novel decoding algorithm based on the alternating directions method of multipliers is derived to reconstruct signals from a limited number of received descriptions. Simulations are performed to assess the performance of CS-GQ against other methods in presence of packet losses. The proposed method is successful at providing robust coding of CS measurements and outperforms other schemes for the considered test metrics

Optimized Network-coded Scalable Video Multicasting over eMBMS Networks

Delivery of multicast video services over fourth generation (4G) networks such as 3GPP Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) is gaining momentum. In this paper, we address the issue of efficiently multicasting layered video services by defining a novel resource allocation framework that aims to maximize the service coverage whilst keeping the radio resource footprint low. A key point in the proposed system mode is that the reliability of multicast video services is ensured by means of an Unequal Error Protection implementation of the Network Coding (UEP-NC) scheme. In addition, both the communication parameters and the UEP-NC scheme are jointly optimized by the proposed resource allocation framework. Numerical results show that the proposed allocation framework can significantly increase the service coverage when compared to a conventional Multi-rate Transmission (MrT) strategy.Comment: Proc. of IEEE ICC 2015 - Mobile and Wireless Networking Symposium, to appea