Enhanced BICM receiver metrics for ultra-reliable low-latency short block channel communications

This paper presents bit-interleaved coded modulation metrics for joint estimation and detection in short block length channels, addressing scenarios with unknown channel state information and low training dimension density. We show that it is possible to enhance the performance and sensitivity through joint detection-estimation compared to standard receivers, especially when the channel state information is unknown and the density of the training dimensions is low. The performance analysis makes use of a full 5G transmitter and receiver chains for both Polar and LDPC coded transmissions paired with QPSK modulation scheme. We consider transmissions where reference signals are interleaved with data and both are transmitted over a small number of OFDM symbols so that near-perfect channel estimation cannot be achieved. This is particularly adapted to mini-slot transmissions for ultra-reliable, low-latency communications (URLLC) or for short packet random access use cases. Performance evaluation spans SIMO and SU-MIMO configurations, emphasizing the efficacy of BICM detection in realistic base station receiver scenarios. Our findings demonstrate that when the detection windows used in the metric units are on the order of four modulated symbols, the proposed receiver metrics can be used to achieve detection performance that is close to that of a coherent receiver with perfect channel state information.