Packet Structure and Receiver Design for Low Latency Wireless Communications with Ultra-Short Packets

Fifth generation wireless standards require much lower latency than what current wireless systems can guarantee. The main challenge in fulfilling these requirements is the development of short packet transmission, in contrast to most of the current standards, which use a long data packet structure. Since the available training resources are limited by the packet size, reliable channel and interference covariance estimation with reduced training overhead are crucial to any system using short data packets. In this paper, we propose an efficient receiver that exploits useful information available in the data transmission period to enhance the reliability of the short packet transmission. In the proposed method, the receive filter (i.e., the sample covariance matrix) is estimated using the received samples from the data transmission without using an interference training period. A channel estimation algorithm to use the most reliable data symbols as virtual pilots is employed to improve quality of the channel estimate. Simulation results verify that the proposed receiver algorithms enhance the reception quality of the short packet transmission.