Low-latency communication plays an increasingly important role in delay-sensitive applications by ensuring the real-time exchange of information. However, due to the constraints on the maximum instantaneous power, bounded latency is hard to be guaranteed. In this paper, we investigate the reliability-latency-rate tradeoff in low-latency communications with finite-blocklength coding (FBC). More specifically, we are interested in the fundamental tradeoff between error probability, delay-violation probability (DVP), and service rate. Based on the effective capacity (EC) and normal approximation, we present several gain-conservation inequalities to bound the reliability-latency-rate tradeoffs. In particular, we investigate the low-latency transmissions over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, over a Rayleigh fading channel, with frequency or spatial diversity, and over a Nakagami-$m$ fading channel. To analytically evaluate the quality-of-service-constrained low-latency communications with FBC, an EC-approximation method is further conceived to derive the closed-form expression of quality-of-service-constrained throughput. For delay-sensitive transmissions in which the latency threshold is greater than the channel coherence time, we find an asymptotic form of the tradeoff between the error probability and DVP over the AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. Our results may provide some insights into the efficient scheduling of low-latency wireless communications in which statistical latency and reliability metrics are adopted.

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