Short-Packet Communications over Multiple-Antenna Rayleigh-Fading Channels
Journal article, 2016

Motivated by the current interest in ultra-reliable, low-latency, machine-type communication systems, we investigate the tradeoff between reliability, throughput, and latency in the transmission of information over multiple-antenna Rayleigh block-fading channels. Specifically, we obtain finite-blocklength, finite-SNR upper and lower bounds on the maximum coding rate achievable over such channels for a given constraint on the packet error probability. Numerical evidence suggests that our bounds delimit tightly the maximum coding rate already for short blocklengths (packets of about 100 symbols). Furthermore, our bounds reveal the existence of a tradeoff between the rate gain obtainable by spreading each codeword over all available time-frequency-spatial degrees of freedom, and the rate loss caused by the need of estimating the fading coefficients over these degrees of freedom. In particular, our bounds allow us to determine the optimal number of transmit antennas and the optimal number of time-frequency diversity branches that maximize the rate. Finally, we show that infinite-blocklength performance metrics such as the ergodic capacity and the outage capacity yield inaccurate throughput estimates.

Author

Giuseppe Durisi

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Tobias Koch

Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Maranon

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Johan Östman

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Yury Polyanskiy

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Wei Yang

Princeton University

IEEE Transactions on Communications

0090-6778 (ISSN) 15580857 (eISSN)

Vol. 64 2 618-629 7362178

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Infrastructure

C3SE (Chalmers Centre for Computational Science and Engineering)

Subject Categories

Communication Systems

DOI

10.1109/TCOMM.2015.2511087

More information

Latest update

3/2/2020 1