GFDM Frame Design for Low-latency Industrial Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a short packet GFDM-basedphysical (PHY) layer for industrial wireless networks to reducelatency. In our proposed PHY layer, the conventional OFDMscheme used in the data field of IEEE 802.11 WLAN standardsis replaced by GFDM. The preamble size is also reduced from 10symbols to 1 symbol. Furthermore, the fields of the overall packetstructure are optimized in terms of total number of subcarriersand cyclic prefix length. Additionally, a noise-free GFDM schemeis subjected to concatenated channel coding to minimize errorrate. Through simulation, packet transmission time is reducedby about 40 ∼ 72% compared to the OFDM-based PHY layerwhile achieving a PER of order 10−3. The obtained results showthat the GFDM-based PHY layer outperforms its counterpart byexhibiting a lower latency and high reliability. This performancerenders the GFDM-based (proposed) PHY layer suitable foradoption in the development of wireless networks for latencyand reliability constrained industrial applications. It should benoted that the simulations presented in this paper express ourfirst step in the direction of using GFDM for industrial wirelessnetworks to achieve low latency and high reliability. We thereforeconsider building a fully functional GFDM based-testbed as partof our future work.