Future 5G systems will need to support ultra-reliable low-latency communications scenarios. From a latency-reliability viewpoint, it is inefficient to rely on average utility-based system design. Therefore, we introduce the notion of guaranteeable delay which is the average delay plus three standard deviations of the mean. We investigate the trade-off between guaranteeable delay and throughput for point-to-point wireless erasure links with unreliable and delayed feedback, by bringing together signal flow techniques to the area of coding. We use tiny codes, i.e. sliding window by coding with just 2 packets, and design three variations of selective-repeat ARQ protocols, by building on the baseline scheme, i.e. uncoded ARQ, developed by Ausavapattanakun and Nosratinia: (i) Hybrid ARQ with soft combining at the receiver; (ii) cumulative feedback-based ARQ without rate adaptation; and (iii) Coded ARQ with rate adaptation based on the cumulative feedback. Contrasting the performance of these protocols with uncoded ARQ, we demonstrate that HARQ performs only slightly better, cumulative feedback-based ARQ does not provide significant throughput while it has better average delay, and Coded ARQ can provide gains up to about 40 in terms of throughput. Coded ARQ also provides delay guarantees, and is robust to various challenges such as imperfect and delayed feedback, burst erasures, and round-trip time fluctuations. This feature may be preferable for meeting the strict end-to-end latency and reliability requirements of future use cases of ultra-reliable low-latency communications in 5G, such as mission-critical communications and industrial control for critical control messaging.
For schemes requiring feedback, it is generally assumed that feedback is lossless and delay-free @cite_28 , @cite_35 . Imperfect and delayed feedback may cause unreliability in packet delivery. Inevitable feedback channel impairments and burst errors may impede the protocol stability. The situation becomes worse under RTT fluctuations along with the delayed feedback. A method of acknowledging packet delivery for retransmission protocols with unreliable feedback has been proposed in @cite_8 . Based on backwards composite acknowledgment from multiple packets, the scheduler can exploit the channel quality to increase reliability at the cost of a small increase in average delay. Attempts to increase feedback reliability via repetition coding might be costly to the receiver node while erroneous feedback detection may increase packet delivery latency and diminish throughput and reliability. In LTE, blind HARQ retransmissions of a packet are proposed to avoid feedback complexity and increase reliability @cite_51 . However, this approach can severely decrease resource utilization efficiency.
@cite_28 @cite_35 @cite_51 @cite_8
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A new coding and queue management algorithm is proposed for communication networks that employ linear network coding. The algorithm has the feature that the encoding process is truly online, as opposed to a block-by-block approach. The setup assumes a packet erasure broadcast channel with stochastic arrivals and full feedback, but the proposed scheme is potentially applicable to more general lossy networks with link-by-link feedback. The algorithm guarantees that the physical queue size at the sender tracks the backlog in degrees of freedom (also called the virtual queue size). The new notion of a node ldquoseeingrdquo a packet is introduced. In terms of this idea, our algorithm may be viewed as a natural extension of ARQ schemes to coded networks. Our approach, known as the drop-when-seen algorithm, is compared with a baseline queuing approach called drop-when-decoded. It is shown that the expected queue size for our approach is O[(1) (1-rho)] as opposed to Omega[(1) (1-rho)2] for the baseline approach, where rho is the load factor. In this paper we examine possible ways that feedback can be used, in the context of systems with network coding capabilities. We illustrate, through a number of simple examples, that use of feedback can be employed for parameter adaptation to satisfy QoS requirements as well as for reliability purposes. We also argue that there are benefits in applying network coding to the feedback packets themselves, and finally, we examine the design of acknowledgment packets. The future wireless networks envision ultra-reliable communication with efficient use of the limited wireless channel resources. Closed-loop repetition protocols where retransmission of a packet is enabled using a feedback channel has been adopted since early days of wireless telecommunication. Protocols such as automatic repeat request (ARQ) are used in today's wireless technologies as a mean to provide the link with reduced rate of packet outage and increased average throughput. The performance of such protocols is strongly dependent to the feedback channel reliability. This paper studies the problem of feedback error and proposes a new method of acknowledging packet delivery for retransmission protocols in unreliable feedback channel conditions. The proposed method is based on backwards composite acknowledgment from multiple packets in a retransmission protocol and provides the scheduler of the wireless channel with additional parameters to configure ultra-reliable communication for a user depending on channel quality. Numerical analysis are presented which show orders of magnitude increase in reliability of the proposed method as compared to ARQ at the cost of a small increase in average experienced delay.