High-Reliability and Low-Latency Wireless Communication for Internet of Things: Challenges, Fundamentals, and Enabling Technologies

As one of the key enabling technologies of emerging smart societies and industries (i.e., industry 4.0), the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved significantly in both technologies and applications. It is estimated that more than 25 billion devices will be connected by wireless IoT networks by 2020. In addition to ubiquitous connectivity, many envisioned applications of IoT, such as industrial automation, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks, smart grids, and remote surgery, will have stringent transmission latency and reliability requirements, which may not be supported by existing systems. Thus, there is an urgent need for rethinking the entire communication protocol stack for wireless IoT networks. In this tutorial paper, we review the various application scenarios, fundamental performance limits, and potential technical solutions for high-reliability and low-latency (HRLL) wireless IoT networks. We discuss physical, MAC (medium access control), and network layers of wireless IoT networks, which all have significant impacts on latency and reliability. For the physical layer, we discuss the fundamental information-theoretic limits for HRLL communications, and then we also introduce a frame structure and preamble design for HRLL communications. Then practical channel codes with finite block length are reviewed. For the MAC layer, we first discuss optimized spectrum and power resource management schemes and then recently proposed grant-free schemes are discussed. For the network layer, we discuss the optimized network structure (traffic dispersion and network densification), the optimal traffic allocation schemes and network coding schemes to minimize latency.