Early decoding for transmission over finite transport blocks

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 the light of this challenge, this paper investigates the throughput performance of wireless systems under channel coding over finite transport blocks (TBs) with the channel state sequence available only at the receiver. We analyze the performance of a communication scheme with feedback, namely early decoding, where for each codeblock the receiver makes a single decoding attempt at a time determined based on the available channel state information. A finite-state Markov channel (FSMC) is introduced to model the TB-based wireless system where the parameters of the model are linked to the characteristics of the underlying physical channel. The FSMC model is then used to assess the maximum achievable throughput of the early decoding strategy. Numerical results suggest that despite its low computational complexity the proposed scheme significantly reduces the coding latency to achieve rates near the channel capacity.