Finite Blocklength Information Theory: What Is the Practical Impact on Wireless Communications?

Abstract

Recent advances in information theory have provided achievability bounds and converses for the coding rate for the finite blocklength regime. In this paper, recent results on the non-asymptotic coding rate for fading channels with no channel state information at the transmitter are exploited to analyze the goodput in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and the energy-efficiency spectral- efficiency (EE-SE) tradeoff where the fundamental relationship between the codeword length and the EE is given. Finally, the true outage probability in Ricean and Nakagami-m block fading channels is investigated and it is proved that the asymptotic outage capacity is the Laplace approximation of the average error probability in finite blocklength regime.