Wireless innovations Next-generation
Online Workshop (WiNOW)
3-6 November, 2025 // Virtual
Fu-Chun Zheng
Harbin Institute of Technology (SZ)
Fu-Chun Zheng obtained the BEng (1985) and MEng (1988) degrees in radio engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, and the PhD degree (1992）in Electrical Engineering from the University of Edinburgh, UK.
From 1995 to 2007, Dr Zheng was with Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia, as a lecturer and then an associate professor in mobile communications. In 2007, he became the Chair of Signal Processing at the University of Reading, UK. He has also been a distinguished adjunct professor with Southeast University, China, since 2010. He is currently with Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), China, as a distinguished professor. Dr Zheng’s current research interests include ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC), green communications, ultra-dense networks and machine learning based resource allocation.
Talk Title: Short Packet Transmission for URLLC: Revisiting Differential Modulation
Ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) is one of the typical use cases in 5G/6G wireless networks, targeting physical layer latency of 0.1ms and reliability of 99.9999% to facilitate various emerging mission critical applications. One critical measure to enable low latency is short packet open-loop transmission, which unfortunately may also lead to (1) poorer system reliability due to the shorter coding length and the inability to retransmit, and (2) poorer channel estimation accuracy due to the much shorter pilot sequences. To overcome these issues, this talk will first review the latency budget in a URLLC system and then re-visit the differential modulation (DM) scheme and apply it to short packet transmission. The well known 3dB SNR deterioration for DM is compensated via macro diversity. Given the dominance of OFDM in current and future wireless systems, DM is then realised in the frequency domain. The performance of such DM based transmission is analysed from the information theory perspective and verified via simulations, demonstrating the resultant benefits, especially under high mobility.