Latency-Critical Downlink Multiple Access: A Hybrid Approach and Reliability Maximization

In this work, we study a downlink multi-user network, where a single access point (AP) is supposed to accomplish data transmissions to all users under low latency constraints. To more effectively cope with the multiple access demand, we consider a hybrid strategy for the multi-user downlink service in finite blocklength (FBL) regime, which combines broadcasting with time-division multiple access (TDMA). In the hybrid strategy, the users are first clustered into different groups. Different groups are served in a TDMA manner with dedicated time slots, while users within each group are served together via a broadcasting signal from the AP. By taking into account the fairness of transmission reliability among all users, we formulate a problem minimizing the maximum error probability among users via jointly determining the user grouping and allocating blocklength among all groups. To address the complicated non-convex problem, we first characterize the optimal blocklength allocation under each given grouping decision, which leads to an optimal closed-form allocation solution via solving an equation system. Based on the characterized features, we are enabled to efficiently distill out the optimal grouping from all possible groupings, which forms the efficient optimal solution for the optimal joint design. Afterwards, aiming at a complexity reduction, we further propose a low-complexity iterative solution, in which the grouping is iteratively improved via the introduced operations until a convergence to a suboptimum. Finally, via simulations, we validate the proposed solutions and reveal the close optimality of the iterative solution. In addition, the hybrid strategy has shown a significant reliability advantage in comparison to pure broadcasting or TDMA, and this performance advantage becomes further enlarged in case of more users.