Peak-Age Violation Guarantees for the Transmission of Short Packets over Fading Channels

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the probability of peak age violations in wireless fading channels, providing guidelines for physical layer parameters to meet age constraints in short packet transmissions.

Contribution

It introduces a nonasymptotic information-theoretic analysis for optimizing physical layer parameters to control peak age violations in fading channels with short packets.

Findings

Derived explicit bounds on peak age violation probability.

Provided design guidelines for SNR, antennas, and pilot symbols.

Validated analysis through numerical examples.

Abstract

We investigate the probability that the peak age of information in a point-to-point communication system operating over a multiantenna wireless fading channel exceeds a predetermined value. The packets are scheduled according to a last-come first-serve policy with preemption in service, and are transmitted over the channel using a simple automatic repetition request protocol. We consider quadrature phase shift keying modulation, pilot-assisted transmission, maximum-likelihood channel estimation, and mismatched scaled nearest-neighbor decoding. Our analysis, which exploits nonasymptotic tools in information theory, allows one to determine, for a given information packet size, the physical layer parameters such as the SNR, the number of transmit and receive antennas, the amount of frequency diversity to exploit, and the number of pilot symbols, to ensure that the system operates below a target peak-age violation probability.