Uplink Transmission Design with Massive Machine Type Devices in Tactile Internet

In this work, we study how to design uplink transmission with massive machine type devices in tactile internet, where ultra-short delay and ultra-high reliability are required. To characterize the transmission reliability constraint, we employ a two-state transmission model based on the achievable rate with finite blocklength channel codes. If the channel gain exceeds a threshold, a short packet can be transmitted with a small error probability; otherwise there is a packet loss. To exploit frequency diversity, we assign multiple subchannels to each active device, from which the device selects a subchannel with channel gain exceeding the threshold for transmission. To show the total bandwidth required to ensure the reliability, we optimize the number of subchannels and bandwidth of each subchannel and the threshold for each device to minimize the total bandwidth of the system with a given number of antennas at the base station. Numerical results show that with 1000 devices in one cell, the required bandwidth of the optimized policy is acceptable even for prevalent cellular systems. Furthermore, we show that by increasing antennas at the BS, frequency diversity becomes unnecessary, and the required bandwidth is reduced.