Energy Efficient Scheduling for Short Packet Communications With Finite Blocklength Coding

Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) has attracted significant attention recently due to its substantial potential in industrial automation and autonomous driving, where both low latency and energy efficiency are critical. Finite blocklength coding has emerged as a promising technique to address latency concerns. However, applying the finite blocklength coding in the URLLC system, while ensuring energy efficiency, remains challenging. To tackle this issue, we focus on short-packet transmission systems and introduce a Lyapunov drift-based scheduling scheme. This scheme is designed to optimize the transmission rate for maximizing the system throughput to achieve the energy efficiency. We constrain the average power using the virtual power queue method. With the Lyapunov theory, the scheduling problem of the URLLC system is then formulated as a non-convex problem, which we tackle by decoupling the problem into multiple sub-problems and approximating higher-order terms using Taylor series expansion. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the performance of our proposed algorithm closely aligns with that of an optimal policy derived from the exhaustive search method.