Downlink Transmission under Heterogeneous Blocklength Constraints: Discrete Signaling with Single-User Decoding

TL;DR

This paper proposes a practical downlink transmission scheme for heterogeneous blocklength constraints using discrete signaling and single-user decoding, achieving near-benchmark performance without SIC.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme that handles diverse latency and reliability needs without relying on SIC, guided by finite blocklength rate analysis.

Findings

Scheme operates close to capacity-achieving benchmarks

Effective for diverse latency and reliability requirements

Finite blocklength analysis guides practical design

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the downlink broadcast channel under heterogenous blocklength constraints, where each user experiences different interference statistics across its received symbols. Different from the homogeneous blocklength case, the strong users with short blocklength transmitted symbol blocks usually cannot wait to receive the entire transmission frame and perform successive interference cancellation (SIC) owing to their stringent latency requirements. Even if SIC is feasible, it may not be perfect under finite blocklength constraints. To cope with the heterogeneity in latency and reliability requirements, we propose a practical downlink transmission scheme with discrete signaling and single-user decoding, i.e., without SIC. In addition, we derive the finite blocklength achievable rate and use it for guiding the design of channel coding and modulations. Both achievable rate and error probability simulation show that the proposed scheme can operate close to the benchmark scheme which assumes capacity-achieving signaling and perfect SIC.