Outage of Periodic Downlink Wireless Networks With Hard Deadlines

We consider a downlink periodic wireless communications system, where multiple access points cooperatively transmit packets to a number of devices, e.g., actuators in an industrial control system. Each period consists of two phases: an uplink training phase and a downlink data transmission phase. Each actuator must successfully receive its unique packet within a single transmission phase; else, an outage is declared. Such an outage can be caused by two events: a transmission error due to transmission at a rate that the channel cannot actually support or time overflow, where the downlink data phase is too short, given the channel conditions to successfully communicate all the packets. We determine the closed-form expressions for the time overflow probability when there are just two field devices, as well as the transmission error probability for an arbitrary number of devices. In addition, we provide upper and lower bounds on the time overflow probability for an arbitrary number of devices. We propose a novel variable-rate transmission method that eliminates time overflow. Detailed system-level simulations are used to identify system design guidelines, such as the optimal amount of training time, as well as for benchmarking the proposed system design versus non-cooperative cellular, cooperative fixed-rate, and cooperative relaying.