Short-Packet Communication Over a Two-User Rayleigh Fading Z-Interference Channel: From Stability Region to the Age of Information

One of the fundamental challenges in 5G and beyond technologies is to support short packet transmissions while ensuring ultra-reliable communication. Due to the distributed nature of the networks, such as machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, interference is unavoidable. The impact of interference on the system’s performance must be better understood when users are constrained to transmit short packets. In addition, users’ traffic is bursty. Thus, they may not always have data to send. This work considers a two-user Z-interference channel (Z-IC) under Rayleigh fading. The work characterizes the stability region corresponding to prominent interference mitigation schemes such as treating interference as noise, successive interference cancellation, and joint decoding schemes using the finite block-length information theory framework. The developed results consider the packet length, rate, and underlying channel model. Evaluating stability region involves determining the probability of successful decoding for the various interference mitigation techniques. The different probabilities of successful decoding are characterized for various interference mitigation techniques. These results are not explored in the existing literature in the context of Z-IC. The developed results also help to explore the impact of interference on average delay and the average age of information for various interference mitigation techniques.