Outage of Periodic Downlink Wireless Networks with Hard Deadlines

TL;DR

This paper analyzes outage probabilities in cooperative downlink wireless networks with hard deadlines, deriving formulas and proposing a variable-rate transmission method to improve reliability and system design.

Contribution

It provides closed-form expressions for outage probabilities, bounds for time overflow, and introduces a novel variable-rate transmission technique to eliminate time overflow.

Findings

Closed-form outage probability expressions for two devices.

Bounds on time overflow probability for multiple devices.

Variable-rate transmission effectively eliminates time overflow.

Abstract

We consider a downlink periodic wireless communications system where multiple access points (APs) cooperatively transmit packets to a number of devices, e.g. actuators in an industrial control system. Each period consists of two phases: an uplink training phase and a downlink data transmission phase. Each actuator must successfully receive its unique packet within a single transmission phase, else an outage is declared. Such an outage can be caused by two events: a transmission error due to transmission at a rate that the channel cannot actually support or time overflow, where the downlink data phase is too short given the channel conditions to successfully communicate all the packets. We determine closed-form expressions for the probability of time overflow when there are just two field devices, as well as the probability of transmission error for an arbitrary number of devices. Also, we provide upper and lower bounds on the time overflow probability for an arbitrary number of devices. We propose a novel variable-rate transmission method that eliminates time overflow. Detailed system-level simulations are used to identify system design guidelines, such as the optimal amount of uplink training time, as well as for benchmarking the proposed system design versus non-cooperative cellular, cooperative fixed-rate, and cooperative relaying.