Arxiv preprint: joint queuing-coding analysis for URLLC

R. Devassy, G. Durisi, G. C. Ferrante, O. Simeone, and E. Uysal-Biyikoglu, “Reliable transmission of short packets through queues and noisy channels under latency and peak-age violation guarantees,” Jun. 2018. [arXiv].

Abstract: This work investigates the probability that the delay and the peak-age of information exceed a desired threshold in a point-to-point communication system with short information packets. The packets are generated according to a stationary memoryless Bernoulli process, placed in a single-server queue and then transmitted over a binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (bi-AWGN) channel. A variable-length stop-feedback coding scheme—a general strategy that encompasses simple automatic repetition request (ARQ) and more sophisticated hybrid ARQ techniques as special cases—is used by the transmitter to convey the information packets to the receiver. By leveraging finite-blocklength results for the bi-AWGN channel, the delay violation and the peak-age violation probabilities are characterized without resorting to approximations based on large-deviation theory as in previous literature. Numerical results illuminate the dependence of delay and peak-age violation probability on system parameters such as the frame size and the undetected error probability, and on the chosen packet-management policy. The guidelines provided by our analysis are particularly useful for the design of low-latency ultra-reliable communication systems.