URLLC with Coded Massive MIMO via Random Linear Codes and GRAND

A present challenge in wireless communications is the assurance of ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC). While the reliability aspect is well known to be improved by channel coding with long codewords, this usually implies using interleavers, which introduce undesirable delay. Using short codewords is a needed change to minimizing the decoding delay. This work proposes the combination of a coding and decoding scheme to be used along with spatial signal processing as a means to provide URLLC over a fading channel. The paper advocates the use of random linear codes (RLCs) over a massive MIMO (mMIMO) channel with standard zero-forcing detection and guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND). The performance of several schemes is assessed over a mMIMO flat fading channel. The proposed scheme greatly outperforms the equivalent scheme using 5G’s polar encoding and decoding for signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of interest. While the complexity of the polar code is constant at all SNRs, using RLCs with GRAND achieves much faster decoding times for most of the SNR range, further reducing latency.