GFDM frame design for low-latency industrial networks

This paper proposes a short packet GFDM-based physical (PHY) layer for industrial wireless networks to reduce latency. In our proposed PHY layer, the conventional OFDM scheme used in the data field of IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards is replaced by GFDM. The preamble size is also reduced from 10 symbols to 1 symbol. Furthermore, the fields of the overall packet structure are optimized in terms of total number of subcarriers and cyclic prefix length. Additionally, a noise-free GFDM scheme is subjected to concatenated channel coding to minimize error rate. Through simulation, packet transmission time is reduced by about 40 ∼ 72% compared to the OFDM-based PHY layer while achieving a PER of order 10⁻³. The obtained results show that the GFDM-based PHY layer outperforms its counterpart by exhibiting a lower latency and high reliability. This performance renders the GFDM-based (proposed) PHY layer suitable for adoption in the development of wireless networks for latency and reliability constrained industrial applications. It should be noted that the simulations presented in this paper express our first step in the direction of using GFDM for industrial wireless networks to achieve low latency and high reliability. We therefore consider building a fully functional GFDM based-testbed as part of our future work.