Block Sparse Vector Coding based Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Short-Packet Transmission

Sparse vector coding (SVC) is a promising short-packet transmission method for ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC) in next-generation communication networks. In this paper, a block SVC (BSVC) based short-packet transmission scheme is proposed to further enhance the transmission performance of SVC. The core idea behind the proposed scheme is to transmit short-packet data information after block sparse transformation. At the transmitter, the transmitted information bits are divided into two parts: one part is mapped into the non-zero indexes of block sparse vectors, and the other part is mapped into non-zero values through quadrature amplitude modulation. After pseudo-random spreading, the block sparse vectors are mapped to time-frequency resources for transmission. At the receiver, the decoding problem is transformed into a block sparse signal recovery problem. A cyclic block matching pursuit algorithm is proposed for accurate decoding by leveraging block-structured sparse prior information. Simulation results verify that the proposed BSVC scheme outperforms the existing SVC schemes in terms of packet error rate and spectral efficiency.