Pilot-Assisted Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling for HRLLC: A Non-Asymptotic Approach

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling within the context of hyper-reliable low-latency communications (HRLLC), specifically focusing on the challenges imposed by the short-packet regime. While traditional Nyquist-based systems maintain symbol orthogonality to prevent inter-symbol interference (ISI), FTN intentionally introduces ISI to achieve higher transmission rates. While many existing FTN studies assume perfect channel state information, this assumption is often impractical for mission-critical HRLLC. In such scenarios, a portion of the limited packet length must be reserved for pilot symbols to ensure reliable estimation. To characterize the achievable error probability while accounting for imperfect channel estimation in the short-blocklength regime, we derive the random coding union bound with parameter $s$ (RCUs) under mismatched decoding for FTN systems. The numerical results demonstrate that FTN provides up to a 2 \dB SNR gain over Nyquist signaling, provided that power allocation and pilot overhead are optimized. These findings highlight the necessity of non-asymptotic analysis for designing efficient, next-generation HRLLC-FTN systems.