No Arabic abstract
5G New Radio (NR) is expected to support new ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) service targeting at supporting the small packets transmissions with very stringent latency and reliability requirements. Current Long Term Evolution (LTE) system has been designed based on grantbased (GB) (i.e., dynamic grant) random access, which can hardly support the URLLC requirements. Grant-free (GF) (i.e., configured grant) access is proposed as a feasible and promising technology to meet such requirements, especially for uplink transmissions, which effectively saves the time of requesting/waiting for a grant. While some basic GF access features have been proposed and standardized in NR Release-15, there is still much space to improve. Being proposed as 3GPP study items, three GF access schemes with Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) retransmissions including Reactive, K-repetition, and Proactive, are analyzed in this paper. Specifically, we present a spatiotemporal analytical framework for the contention-based GF access analysis. Based on this framework, we define the latent access failure probability to characterize URLLC reliability and latency performances. We propose a tractable approach to derive and analyze the latent access failure probability of the typical UE under three GF HARQ schemes. Our results show that under shorter latency constraints, the Proactive scheme provides the lowest latent access failure probability, whereas, under longer latency constraints, the K-repetition scheme achieves the lowest latent access failure probability, which depends on K. If K is overestimated, the Proactive scheme provides lower latent access failure probability than the K-repetition scheme.
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as one of the emerging technologies for future communication systems by leveraging the tuning capabilities of their reflecting elements. In this paper, we investigate the potential of an RIS-based architecture for uplink sensor data transmission in an ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) context. In particular, we propose an RIS-aided grant-free access scheme for an industrial control scenario, aiming to exploit diversity and achieve improved reliability performance. We consider two different resource allocation schemes for the uplink transmissions, i.e., dedicated and shared slot assignment, and three different receiver types, namely the zero-forcing, the minimum mean squared error (MMSE), and the MMSE-successive interference cancellation receivers. Our extensive numerical evaluation in terms of outage probability demonstrates the gains of our approach in terms of reliability, resource efficiency, and capacity and for different configurations of the RIS properties. An RIS-aided grant-free access scheme combined with advanced receivers is shown to be a well-suited option for uplink URLLC.
Fifth Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) does not support data transmission during random access (RA) procedures, which results in unnecessary control signalling overhead and power consumption, especially for small data transmission (SDT). Motivated by this, 3GPP has proposed 4/2-step SDT RA schemes based on the existing grant-based (4-step) and grant-free (2-step) RA schemes, with the aim to enable data transmission during RA procedures in Radio Resource Control (RRC) Inactive state. To compare the 4/2-step SDT RA schemes with the benchmark 4/2-step RA schemes, we provide a spatio-temporal analytical framework to evaluate the RA schemes, which jointly models the preamble detection, Physical Uplink Shared Channel (PUSCH) decoding, and data transmission procedures. Based on this analytical model, we derive the analytical expressions for the overall packet transmission success probability and average throughput in each RACH attempt. We also derive the average energy consumption in each RACH attempt. Our results show that 2-step SDT RA scheme provides the highest overall packet transmission success probability, and the lowest average energy consumption, but the performance gain decreases with the increase of device intensity.
The newly introduced ultra-reliable low latency communication service class in 5G New Radio depends on innovative low latency radio resource management solutions that can guarantee high reliability. Grant-free random access, where channel resources are accessed without undergoing assignment through a handshake process, is proposed in 5G New Radio as an important latency reducing solution. However, this comes at an increased likelihood of collisions resulting from uncontrolled channel access, when the same resources are preallocated to a group of users. Novel reliability enhancement techniques are therefore needed. This article provides an overview of grant-free random access in 5G New Radio focusing on the ultra-reliable low latency communication service class, and presents two reliability-enhancing solutions. The first proposes retransmissions over shared resources, whereas the second proposal incorporates grant-free transmission with non-orthogonal multiple access with overlapping transmissions being resolved through the use of advanced receivers. Both proposed solutions result in significant performance gains, in terms of reliability as well as resource efficiency. For example, the proposed non-orthogonal multiple access scheme can support a normalized load of more than 1.5 users/slot at packet loss rates of ~10^{-5} - a significant improvement over the maximum supported load with conventional grant-free schemes like slotted-ALOHA.
We propose a novel joint activity, channel, and data estimation (JACDE) scheme for cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems compliant with fifth-generation (5G) new radio (NR) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling. The contribution aims to allow significant overhead reduction of cell-free MIMO systems by enabling grant-free access, while maintaining moderate throughput per user. To that end, we extend the conventional MIMO OFDM protocol so as to incorporate activity detection capability without resorting to spreading informative data symbols, in contrast with related work which typically relies on signal spreading. Our method leverages a Bayesian message passing scheme based on Gaussian approximation, which jointly performs active user detection (AUD), channel estimation (CE), and multi-user detection (MUD), incorporating also a well-structured low-coherent pilot design based on frame theory, which mitigates pilot contamination, and finally complemented with a detector empowered by bilinear message passing. The efficacy of the resulting JACDE-based grant-free access scheme without spreading data sequences is demonstrated by simulation results, which are shown to significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art and approach the performance of an idealized (genie-aided) scheme in which user activity and channel coefficients are perfectly known.
In the envisioned 5G, uplink grant-free multiple access will become the enabler of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) services. By removing the forward scheduling request (SR) and backward scheduling grant (SG), pilot-based channel estimation and data transmission are launched in one-shot communications with the aim of maintaining the reliability of $99.999% $ or more and latency of 1ms or less under 5G new radio (NR) numerologies. The problem is that channel estimation can easily suffer from pilot aware attack which significantly reduces the system reliability. To solve this, we proposed to apply the hierarchical 2-D feature coding (H2DF) coding on time-frequency-code domain to safeguard channel state information (CSI), which informs a fundamental rethinking of reliability, latency and accessibility. Considering uplink large-scale single-input multiple-output (SIMO) reception of short packets, we characterize the analytical closed-form expression of reliability and define the accessibility of system. We find two fundamental tradeoffs: reliability-latency and reliability-accessibility. With the the help of the two fundamental trade-offs, we demonstrate how CSI protection could be integrated into uplink grant-free multiple access to strengthen URLLC services comprehensively.