Coding Across Finite Transport Blocks in Modern Wireless Communication Systems

Future wireless communications will face the dual challenge of supporting large traffic volume while providing reliable service for various kinds of delay-sensitive traffic. In light of this challenge, this paper investigates the throughput performance of wireless communication systems under channel coding over finite transport blocks (TBs) with the channel state sequence available only at the receiver. When we apply coding across multiple TBs, the underlying wireless channel can be effectively modeled as a finite-state Markov chain. By linking the characteristics of the underlying physical channel to the parameters of the Markov chain, we characterize the channel dispersion of the corresponding system. The channel dispersion is then used to assess the coding performance of various communication strategies. We also propose a communication scheme where the receiver determines the decoding time based on the available channel state sequence. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the coding delay to achieve rates near the channel capacity.