Explicit Performance Bound of Finite Blocklength Coded MIMO: Time-Domain versus Spatiotemporal Channel Coding

In the sixth generation (6G), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) will be further developed to achieve TKμ extreme connectivity. On the premise of ensuring the same rate and reliability, the spatial domain advantage of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has the potential to further shorten the time-domain code length and is expected to be a key enabler for the realization of TKμ. Different coded MIMO schemes exhibit disparities in exploiting the spatial domain characteristics, so we consider two extreme MIMO coding schemes, namely, time-domain coding in which the codewords on multiple spatial channels are independent of each other, and spatiotemporal coding in which multiple spatial channels are jointly coded. By analyzing the statistical characteristics of information density and utilizing the normal approximation, we provide explicit performance bounds for finite blocklength coded MIMO under time-domain coding and spatiotemporal coding. It is found that, different from the phenomenon in time-domain coding where the performance degrades as the blocklengths decrease, spatiotemporal coding can effectively compensate for the performance loss caused by short blocklengths by improving the spatial degrees of freedom (DoF). These results indicate that spatiotemporal coding can fully exploit the spatial dimension advantages of MIMO systems, enabling extremely low error-rate communication under stringent blocklengths constraint.