Statistical URLLC Provisioning in 6G Network over Fading Channels

There is a growing interest in ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) since it will provide a new paradigm service involving Tbps data rates with one-millisecond latency for mission-critical applications of sixth-generation (6G) networks. However, due to fading phenomenon in wireless channels, it may be unrealistic to support deterministic delay guarantees of URLLC. Motivated by this challenge, we propose a robust channel estimation approach that obtains accurate channel characteristics. We then analyze the effective capacity of the fading channel to calculate the maximum arrival rate over the channel that supports the latency constraint of URLLC. We also investigate the substantial impact of channel uncertainty on the effective capacity and then derive a lower bound on the effective capacity for a theoretical latency guarantee. Numerical results verify the superiority of the proposed method in terms of reliability and latency provisioning over existing techniques.