Comparison between Different Channel Coding Techniques for IEEE 802.11be within Factory Automation Scenarios

Abstract

This paper presents improvements in the physical layer reliability of the IEEE 802.11be standard. Most wireless system proposals do not fulfill the stringent requirements of Factory Automation use cases. The harsh propagation features of industrial environments usually require time retransmission techniques to guarantee link reliability. At the same time, retransmissions compromise latency. IEEE 802.11be, the upcoming WLAN standard, is being considered for Factory Automation (FA) communications. 802.11be addresses specifically latency and reliability difficulties, typical in the previous 802.11 standards. This paper evaluates different channel coding techniques potentially applicable in IEEE 802.11be. The methods suggested here are the following: WLAN LDPC, WLAN Convolutional Codes (CC), New Radio (NR) Polar, and Long Term Evolution (LTE)-based Turbo Codes. The tests consider an IEEE 802.11be prototype under the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel and industrial channel models. The results suggest that the best performing codes in factory automation cases are the WLAN LDPCs and New Radio Polar Codes.

A Survey on FEC Techniques for Industrial Wireless Communications

“…While in [32], BER is used as a threshold for testing the WirelessHP PHY layer with different low-order modulations at different communications distances. A BLER threshold is defined in [33] to compare different FEC candidates' performance with the IEEE 802.11be PHY layer, assuming different industrial channel models. In [34]- [36], BLER and PLR are an upper bound for testing the IEEE 802.11 PHY layer performance assuming deterministic protocols.…”

“…FEC contributes notably to the receiver decoding latency [22]. In many works, it is described as the ratio between the clock cycles required by the decoding latency and the clock frequency of the hardware used for the implementation [33], [38], [39](see Eq. 1).…”

“…In [33] is shown that CA-Polar outperforms the IEEE 802.11 CC for data with reduced sizes (in the order of 100 bit). Moreover, many SCL decoding proposals based on semi-parallelism offer reduced decoding latencies [22].…”

“…Reliability is analyzed using MAT-LAB simulations based on BLER metrics. Finally, latency is evaluated as decoding latency, following the approach proposed by previous works [33], [38], [39]. The decoding algorithms were previously suggested in Section IV.…”

Sparse Vector Coding for Short-Packet Transmission on Industrial Communications: Reference Architecture and Design Challenges

“…Thus, many channel coding architectures for short packet transmission have been investigated during the last years. However, a few of them are applicable within the manufacturing environments [6], [7]. In [8], for instance, the authors optimize the design of the Polar Codes for achieving high reliability and transmission latency in the order of the sub-milliseconds.…”