Transmission Energy Minimization for Heterogeneous Low-Latency NOMA Downlink

This paper investigates the transmission energy minimization problem for the two-user downlink with strictly heterogeneous latency constraints. To cope with the latency constraints and to explicitly specify the trade-off between blocklength (latency) and reliability the normal approximation of the capacity of finite blocklength codes (FBCs) is adopted, in contrast to the classical Shannon capacity formula. We first consider the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based transmission scheme. However, due to heterogeneous latency constraints and channel conditions at receivers, the conventional successive interference cancellation may be infeasible. We thus study the problem by considering heterogeneous receiver conditions under different interference mitigation schemes and solve the corresponding NOMA design problems. It is shown that, though the energy function is not convex and does not have closed form expression, the studied NOMA problems can be globally solved semi-analytically and with low complexity. Moreover, we propose a hybrid transmission scheme that combines the time division multiple access (TDMA) and NOMA. Specifically, the hybrid scheme can judiciously perform bit and time allocation and take TDMA and NOMA as two special instances. To handle the more challenging hybrid design problem, we propose a concave approximation of the FBC rate/capacity formula, by which we obtain computationally efficient and high-quality solutions. Simulation results show that the hybrid scheme can achieve considerable transmission energy saving compared with both pure NOMA and TDMA schemes.

I. Introduction

The ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) is one of the emerging application scenarios in 5G [2], [3], where the system promises to serve multiple autonomous machines with high reliability and low latency [4]–[6]. The traffic of such an URLLC system is drastically different from that of the human-centric 4G LTE. More specifically, the communication is required to have no less than 99.999% reliability (that is, packet error probability), no longer than 1ms latency, and small packet size (such as 32 bytes) [7]. Therefore, especially for multi-user channels, new system architectures and transmission schemes compared to the traditional human-centric communications are required to achieve the URLLC specifications. Moreover, energy-efficiency is a key performance indicator of 5G communications [8], and it is important to develop new energy-efficient transmissions for URLLC multi-user channels.