Delay Analysis for Wireless Fading Channels with Finite Blocklength Channel Coding

Upcoming low-latency machine-to-machine (M2M) applications are currently attracting a significant amount of interest from the wireless networking research community. The design challenge with respect to such future applications is to allow wireless networks to operate extremely reliably at very short deadlines for rather small packets. To date, it is unclear how to design wireless networks efficiently for such novel requirements. One reason is that existing performance models for wireless networks often assume that the rate of the channel code is equal to the Shannon capacity. However, this model does not hold anymore when the packet size and thus blocklength of the channel code is small. Although it is known that finite blocklength has a major impact on the physical layer performance, we lack higher-layer performance models which account in particular for the queueing effects under the finite blocklength regime.