5G URLLC: Design Challenges and System Concepts

Zexian Li1, Hamidreza Shariatmadari2, Bikramjit Singh2, Mikko A. Uusitalo1

1
Nokia Bell Labs, Espoo, Finland, E-mail: [email protected]
2
Department of Communications and Networking, Aalto University, Finland, E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract—The upcoming fifth generation (5G) wireless of verticals which brings new business to the whole
communication system is expected to support a broad range of telecommunication industry.
newly emerging applications on top of the regular cellular
With the current Rel-15 work, 3GPP Radio Access
mobile broadband services. One of the key usage scenarios in
Network (RAN) working group aims at providing URLLC
the scope of 5G is ultra-reliable and low-latency
service for small data payloads (e.g. 32 bytes) with radio
communications (URLLC). Among the active researchers
latency of 1 ms (i.e. the latency is measured at the layer 3/2)
from both academy and industry, one common view is that
and with an outage probability of less than 10 -5 [1]. Regarding
URLLC will play an essential role in providing connectivity
to the design target in the upcoming releases for example Rel-
for the new services and applications from vertical domains,
16 and beyond, clearly the requirements are even more
such as factory automation, autonomous driving and so on.
stringent. The stringent requirements make URLLC a
The most important key performance indicators (KPIs) related
challenging service that entails employing advanced
to URLLC are latency, reliability and availability. In this
techniques in different parts of the 5G system. To meet such
paper, after brief discussion on the design challenges related to
challenging requirements, new technical enablers must be
URLLC use cases, we present an overview of the available
adopted. Such new technical enablers include new
technology components from 3GPP Rel-15 and potential ones
numerologies, slot/mini-slot structure, link adaptation, and
from Rel-16. In addition, coordinated multi-cell resource
various diversity techniques for reliability enhancement
allocation methods are studied. From the system level
[3][4][5]. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the challenging
simulation results in an urban macro environment, it can be
key performance indicators (KPIs) from the most demanding
observed that effective multi-cell cooperation, more
use cases, we describe the most critical technology
specifically soft combining, can lead to a significant gain in
components for supporting URLLC from the aspects of RAN.
terms of URLLC capacity.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
Keywords—5G, URLLC, latency, reliability, multi-cell/multi- introduces URLLC requirements. In section III we will discuss
TRP (Tx/Rx Point) coordination; the major technical components for latency reduction and
reliability enhancement. Section IV introduces one physical
I. INTRODUCTION layer multi-connectivity and its performance. Finally,
Up to now, the Third Generation Partnership Project conclusions are drawn in Section V.
(3GPP) has been making good progress in the design of 5G II. USE CASES AND REQUIREMENTS
New Radio (NR). And three different service categories have
been considered [1]: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), In 3GPP, especially within Service and System Aspects
massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra- (SA) working group, extensive studies have been carried out
reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC). This is to understand the most relevant and important use cases and
well aligned with the International Telecommunication Union applications from vertical domains [6]. Clearly the most
(ITU) requirements for the International Mobile important and well-known use cases requiring ultra-low
Telecommunications 2020 and beyond (IMT-2020) [2]. latency and extremely high reliability are future factory
applications, distributed utility grid protection, autonomous
Similar to traditional cellular services, eMBB addresses the driving and so on. The following Table I depicts the relevant
human-centric use cases for accessing multi-media content, KPIs of these use cases. It should be pointed out here only
service, and data. mMTC is characterized by a large number end-to-end latency and reliability are included due to limited
of connected devices typically transmitting a relatively low space, while there are other key parameters as for example
volume of non-delay-sensitive data. URLLC is a synchronization jitter, network availability, survival time, and
communication service for successfully delivering packets user experienced data rate.
with stringent requirements, particularly in terms of
availability, latency, and reliability. URLLC will enable Taking industrial applications as one example we can
supporting the emerging applications and services. Example discuss in a bit more detail here in this section. Very likely
services include wireless control and automation in industrial that industrial applications within a limited area or region, e.g.,
factory environments, inter-vehicular communications for in a factory, harbor, airport, campus, are the most promising to
improved safety and efficiency, and the tactile internet. It is of achieve a positive business case. Considering the most typical
importance for 5G especially considering the effective support use cases of Automation/Motion Control, these are closed-
Table I. Example of low latency and high reliability use cases Table II: OFDM numerologies (normal CP length)
and their requirements Subcarrier 15 30 60 120 240
Scenario End-to-end Reliability Spacing [kHz]
latency
Discrete automation – 1 ms 99,9999% Symbol duration 66.7 33.3 16.7 8.33 4.17
motion control [us]
Electricity distribution – 5 ms 99,9999%
high voltage) Nominal Normal 4.7 2.3 1.2 0.59 0.29
CP [us]
Remote control 5 ms 99,999%
Discrete automation 10 ms 99,99% Minimum 14 14 14 14 28
Intelligent transport 10 ms 99,9999% scheduling
systems – interval
infrastructure backhaul (symbols)
Process automation – 50 ms 99,9999%
remote control Minimum 1 0.5 0.25 0.125 0.125
Process automation ‒ 50 ms 99,9% scheduling
monitoring interval (ms)
Electricity distribution – 25 ms 99,9%
medium voltage
In 3GPP, a very flexible frame structure for 5G NR was
introduced. The new frame structure can offer different
loop control applications requiring URLLC services, e.g., use
possibilities to shorten the duration of the TTI which is a clear
of collaborative robots in a factory: advantage comparing to LTE. For instance, the configurable
• Latency: from <1 ms to 10 ms. Subcarrier Spacing (SCS) supports operation in different
• Data rate: low as in most cases messages are rather frequency bands. The 15 kHz SCS corresponds to the baseline
small. configuration, and can be scaled with a factor of 2N, where N=
• Reliability: up to BLER <10-9. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The higher SCS, the more symbols can be
accommodated in one sub-frame. Table II above illustrates the
5G system should be designed not only meeting the end- current agreed Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing
to-end requirements but also achieving an efficient system (OFDM) numerologies for 5G NR with normal Cyclic Prefix
deployment. However, network deployment and related (CP) length.
optimizations are not in the scope of this paper as our focus is
On top of this, the number of OFDM symbols per TTI can
mainly about radio network design to enhance the overall vary as well. Within NR, the UEs can be scheduled either on
system performance. slot level of 14 OFDM symbols or on non-slot (a.k.a. mini-slot)
level. The length of mini-slot can range from 1 to 13 symbols.
III. TECHNOLOGY COMPONENTS TO ACHIEVE LOW LATENCY Therefore, the reduced TTI length can be achieved by reducing
AND HIGH RELIABILITY the symbol duration (increasing the SCS) and/or reducing the
number of symbols per TTI. For example, a TTI duration of
In this section, we discuss various technology components, 0.125 ms can be obtained by scheduling users on a slot
which are already defined in 3GPP Rel-15 or to be considered resolution for the case with 120 kHz subcarrier spacing.
in the upcoming releases. These technology components are Another possibility, more suitable for low frequency bands, is
used to improve system performance especially in terms of e.g. to use 15 kHz SCS (N=0) and schedule users with a non-
latency and reliability, kind of “URLLC tool box”. The slot length of 1-3 symbols (~71-222 µs).
technology components are classified into two major
categories: for latency reduction and for reliability 2) Scheduling policy
enhancement. However, it should be pointed out that actually It is well known that the efficient scheduling algorithms can
these two aspects are not really independent, but rather tightly also reduce the latency. Some of these algorithms are as
correlated. For example, the technology components which follows:
mainly targeted for low latency could bring more
retransmission opportunity which in turn results into more • Non-slot based scheduling
gains in terms of reliability. Non-slot or mini-slot based scheduling is one key enabler
with 5G which is useful in various scenarios especially for low
A. Low latency latency transmission. It is envisioned that non-slot based
Here we introduce the main technology components from scheduling is essential to fulfill the challenging latency targets
the URLLC tool box for latency reduction. especially in lower spectrum.
1) New numerology and transmission time interval (TTI) A mini-slot, the smallest scheduling unit, supports the short
duration transmission duration that is accompanied with the reduced
 UE gNB UE gNB

RRC configuration RRC configuration

PHY activation
(a) one-symbol mini-slot UL data transmision
MAC CE ACK
Feedback (ACK/NACK)
UL data transmision

RRC reconfiguration
(e.g. UL GF deactivation) Feedback (ACK/NACK)

(b) two-symbol mini-slot PHY deactivation

(a) Type 1 (b) Type 2

PDSCH PDCCH
Figure 2 UL grant-free transmission
Figure 1: Mini-slot (or non-slot) based DL scheduling
In such case, one option is that without waiting the URLLC
data is sent, using the allocated eMBB resources. This
processing time accordingly. The mini-slot length of 2, 4 or operation is similar to inter-UE puncturing scheduling in DL.
7 symbols is in the recommendation of 3GPP. The supporting Similar scheme as DL PI could help the decoding process at
of front-load Demodulation Reference Signal (DMRS) in mini- gNB as well.
slot enables performing the channel estimation earlier. As
shown in Figure 1, at least there are two main approaches for 3) UL grant-free (GF) transmission
the scheduling of a mini-slot. In addition, across multi- For the extremely low latency and reliability requirements,
slot/min-slot scheduling is supported as well. it is desirable to support UL GF transmission scheme (i.e. data
• Efficient URLLC and eMBB multiplexing transmission without resource request). UL GF transmission
can avoid the regular handshake delay: sending the scheduling
How to efficiently multiplexing URLLC and eMBB traffic request and waiting for UL grant allocation. Another advantage
is one of the key issues to be solved as well. In principle the is that it can relax the stringent reliability requirements on
multiplexing issue covers the scenarios for both inter-UE and control channels as well. There are two types of GF
intra-UE, also for both DL and UL. For DL, preemptive configuration schemes supported in 3GPP Rel-15.
scheduling [7][8] was specified already. With preemptive
scheduling, eMBB traffic is scheduled on all the available radio For the UL GF type 1, similar as LTE semi-persistent
resources with a long TTI, e.g., 1 ms. When URLLC data scheduling (SPS), UL data transmission is based on RRC (re-)
arrives at the gNB, it is immediately transmitted to the configuration without any L1 signaling. Potentially SPS
corresponding UE by overwriting part of an ongoing eMBB scheduling can provide the suitability for deterministic URLLC
transmission. The advantage of this scheme is that the URLLC traffic pattern. This is because the traffic properties can be well
packets are transmitted without waiting for ongoing scheduled matched by appropriate resource configuration. With UL GF
transmissions to be completed. The potential problem with the type 2 allows additional L1 signaling is introduced. The L1
preemptive scheduling is the degraded decoding performance signaling can be for a fast modification of semi-persistently
of eMBB UEs whose transmission is stopped in the middle. To allocated resources. In such way, it enables the flexibility of
reduce the negative impacts, puncturing indication (PI) was UL GF transmission in term of URLLC traffic properties for
introduced in 3GPP to inform the “victim” UE. The main example packet arrival rate, number of UEs sharing the same
objective of PI is to tell the UE that part of its transmission has resource pool and/or packet size. It is worth to point out that no
been overwritten. This enables the UE to take this effect into matter with type 1 or type 2, it is up to gNB configuration to
account when decoding the transmission. To be more specific, determine whether the resource is exclusive to one UE or not.
it knows which part of the transmission is corrupted. Similar
concept can be extended to UL as well. For UL multiplexing B. High reliability
between eMBB and URLLC services, one scheme which has Obviously, the radio link quality affects overall system
been proposed and studied in 3GPP RAN1 is the pause-resume reliability. Signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) is
scheme (see [9]). With pause-resume scheme, the URLLC UE often used to measure the quality of the radio link. The higher
can take the already allocated resource from eMBB UE. the SINR, the lower block error probability, which results in
In addition to inter-UE multiplexing, intra-UE multiplexing higher reliability and low latency. It is therefore important that
between URLLC and eMBB services could be an issue as well. a URLLC UE experience SINR above a certain threshold with
It is possible that the UE could prioritize different logical very high probability. In general, SINR can be increased either
channels between URLLC and eMBB before data by enhancing the signal power, for example with redundancy,
transmissions. However, considering a case that one UE has diversity and/or to reduce the interference power via
ongoing UL eMBB transmission while URLLC data arrives, or interference management. Among the technology components
the UE has an upcoming scheduled UL transmission but does for reliability enhancement, macro diversity will be discussed
not have sufficient time to prepare URLLC data for this in Section V.
transmission.
 Tx 1 1 Rx PDCCH PDSCH PDCCH PDSCH PDCCH PDSCH PDCCH PDSCH
Data stream

Data stream
Combining
Precoding
T R

DCI (1,2,3,4) D1 DCI (2,3,4) D2 DCI (3,4) D3 DCI (4) D4

PMI Figure 4: Reliable transmission of DL assignment information

Figure 3: Example of micro-diversity operation with SU

single stream transmission only, i.e., the 4th transmission. With such method, the
reliability of the assignment message is increased at the cost of
1) Micro-diversity slightly increased signaling overhead. In case UE misses one
assignment message, the allocated resource could still be
Micro-diversity refers to the case that having multiple identified with the subsequent assignment message or the
antennas at either the transmitter side or the receiver side or previous assignment message. The same operation principle
both. One example is shown in Figure 3. For URLLC service, can be of course applied also for scheduling K transmissions
single-user single-stream (i.e. Rank 1) transmission is the most for PUSCH as well. The number of repetitions can be flexibly
preferred mode due to the design target is to support high configured by the gNB depending on the reliability target.
reliability.
• Asymmetric detection of ACK/NACK
URLLC link should be operated with at least 2x2 or even
more number of antennas. Single-user (SU) single-stream As mentioned earlier, protecting the NACK signal is more
important than protecting the ACK signal. This is because
transmission schemes, i.e., maximizing the diversity order of
erroneous NACK detection degrades the communication
the wireless link should be adopted. As discussed in 3GPP, for reliability. On the other hand, wrongly decoding an ACK as a
the purposes of URLLC performance evaluation, 4x4 was NACK will not result in performance degradation in terms of
selected to get sufficient diversity orders. With the assumption reliability but on spectral efficiency. This leads to the thought
of independent fading channels among different antenna pairs, of using enhanced NACK protection by applying the
high spatial diversity gain can be achieved. asymmetric signal detection for example [10].
2) High reliable control channels • Adaptive configuring CQI report
URLLC service requires the tight latency and high The reliability of CQI report itself will bring impacts on the
reliability not only for data channel, but also for control overall reliability as well. When a reported CQI value is
channels as discussed in [4], [5]. Below we are discussing decoded wrongly as higher values, it will result in employing a
various methods for improving the reliability of control higher MCS and hence reduced the overall communication
channels. reliability. One way to enhance the CQI report reliability is to
• PDCCH: high aggregation levels increase the allocated radio resource or decreasing the payload
of CQI report. In detail, the potential enhancements can be
With higher aggregation levels, the control information can considered for example:
be transmitted using excessive resources, by using lower
coding rate and/or lower modulation order for reducing the o Increased resource for URLLC UE CQI reporting
bit/symbol error rates. A high aggregation level of 16 is agreed (while keeping the same CQI payload size as eMBB
in 3GPP Rel-15 for URLLC PDCCH transmission. URLLC UEs e.g. 4 bits): with the increased resource,
the effective coding rate can be reduced which leads to
• Repetition of scheduling information more reliable CQI decoding at the gNB. This scheme
can be supported in Rel-15 already.
In our view, increasing the reliability of assignment
message can be achieved by including the resource allocation o Another alternative is to define a smaller CQI payload
information of current transmission and sub-sequent (while keeping the same resources between URLLC
retransmission. Taking the example shown in the Figure 4, it is UEs and eMBB UEs): in this case the payload of CQI
report becomes smaller for URLLC UEs comparing to
assumed that maximal 4 transmissions is allowed and no ACK
eMBB UEs. This can lead to a reduced granularity of
received during this period. With this assumption, the first reporting channel quality. However, with the same
assignment message can include the resource allocation amount of resource for CQI reporting, the reliability
information for all the 4 transmissions. In the second slot, the performance for CQI decoding can be improved.
resource assignment information is updated with 3
transmissions only, i.e., from the 2nd to 4th transmissions. 3) HARQ enhancement
Following the same principle, the last scheduling message One benefit of the dynamic scheduling scheme is that the
including the resource information for the last transmission network can assign the resources to the UE in a very flexible
 TRP1 TRP2
Frequency

Frequency
UE1 UE2
UE2 UE1

(a) Time (b) Time

TRP2 TRP2

Frequency
Frequency

UE1
UE2

Time Time
Figure 6: Performance comparison between baseline and the
(c) (d) soft combining scheme
Figure 5: Example of baseline transmission and joint- cell non-coherent joint transmission is among the promising
transmission: (a) baseline; (b) macro-diversity/soft combining; candidate transmission schemes.
(c) SFN; (d) Narrow-band muting
For URLLC, multi-TRP communication can be one of the
potential enablers of high reliability. With multiple TRPs,
manner according to the amount of data in the buffer and either data packet or control packet or even both can be
hence optimize the radio resource utilization. Furthermore, duplicated among multiple TRPs and sent to the target UEs by
URLLC traffic can be flexibly multiplexed with eMBB. multiple TRPs. Different version of the same data packet or
Considering URLLC traffic, one potential concern is the the same control information can be received jointly. And UE
additional latency especially in UL due to the resource request can potentially combine them in PHY layer. Therefore, the
and grant before the UL data transmission. This delay is spatial diversity gain can be achieved.
prolonged by potential HARQ retransmissions also using Inter-cell non-coherent joint transmission can be
dynamic scheduling. In order to solve this problem, various implemented in different ways as discussed in our early paper
enhancements have been discussed to reduce the [11]. Three well-known techniques to increase robustness of a
retransmission latency. One scheme which has been adopted communication link are discussed, namely Single-Frequency
in 3GPP is proactive repetition which can be referred as K Network (SFN) where the same packet is sent with exactly the
repetitions as well. With K repetition, one UE can get the same resource block from multiple TRPs; narrowband muting
resource for K times transmissions. In case no ACK received with the main target to reduce inter-cell interference and
for one UL transmission, the UE will automatically transmit macro-diversity with soft combining. Based on the outcome
the same packet again. from [11], it can be observed that in a dense indoor
deployment where inter-cell interference is the main reason of
4) Interference mitigation
degraded performance, inter-cell coordination is a powerful
Mitigating interference by either network-based or UE- approach to increase the reliability of the transmissions
based techniques has been identified as a promising without incurring in longer delays as it is the case of
complementary solution to improve the SINR. Reducing the retransmissions.
received interference from neighboring gNBs or UEs As extension of our previous work, below we will look at
improves SINR. As a rule of thumb, cancelling the strongest the performance for outdoor scenario defined in 3GPP for
or two strongest interferers is usually enough to achieve most URLLC evaluation. Based on our extensive simulations, in
of the potential gain. It is expected that interference mitigation case with noise-limited scenario, soft combining is a better
will be handled in the coming Rel-16 URLLC work. candidate. Therefore, below we will focus on the scheme with
soft combing. In this scheme, non-coherent transmission of the
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUTION OF MACRO-DIVERSITY desired packet is done by the cooperating TRPs, as depicted in
It is well known that various multi-connectivity schemes Figure 5 (b). The same data packet is sent from multiple TRPs
can provide diversity gain for increasing the reliability. independently. And at UE side, the UE applies soft combining
Macroscopic diversity, i.e., data duplication and redundant on the received data packets. Such non-coherent transmission
transmission/reception from multiple cells/TRPs, is also can be done independently, such that each TRP performs
required in order to combat the slow fading effects (or independent scheduling and with multiple PDCCHs, one per
shadowing and/or blocking) and to provide mobility cooperating TRPs.
robustness during handovers. In addition, macro-diversity Figure 6 shows the performance difference between
provides benefits in terms of resilience against failures of the regular single TRP transmission and the studied multiple TRP
cellular infrastructure. In this regard, data duplication at the transmission with soft combing at UE. The 3GPP outdoor
packet data convergence protocol (PDCP) layer has been simulation environment [8] is adopted and 20% UEs are
agreed for NR in the 3GPP Rel-15. At physical layer, inter- indoor UEs. From the simulation results, clearly, we can see
that with soft combing, the offer URLLC load is about 2.6 valuable comments and thanks to many Nokia colleagues for
Mbps and in case with regular transmission, the value is about helpful discussions. This work was supported in part by the
1.8 Mbps which means more than 40% capacity gain due to Business Finland under the project Wireless for Verticals
the joint transmission from multiple TRPs while keeping the (WIVE).
reliability level at 10-5 within 1 ms latency.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT 2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications
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The authors would like to thank Kimmo Valkealahti for
providing simulation results. Thanks to Harish Viswanathan for