Priority Enabled Grant-Free Access With Dynamic Slot Allocation for Heterogeneous mMTC Traffic in 5G NR Networks

Although grant-based mechanisms have been a predominant approach for wireless access for years, the additional latency required for initial handshake message exchange and the extra control overhead for packet transmissions have stimulated the emergence of grant-free (GF) transmission. GF access prov...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on communications 2021-05, Vol.69 (5), p.3192-3206
Main Authors: Weerasinghe, Thilina N., Casares-Giner, Vicente, Balapuwaduge, Indika A. M., Li, Frank Y.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
5G mobile communication
Analytical models
Dynamic scheduling
dynamic slot allocation
Grant-free access
Markov chains
Markov processes
Massive machine type communications
mMTC traffic
Network latency
NR numerology
Occupancy
Packet transmission
Performance evaluation
pseudo-aggregated process
Slot allocation
Subframes
Two dimensional models
two-dimensional Markov chain
Wireless communication
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Summary:Although grant-based mechanisms have been a predominant approach for wireless access for years, the additional latency required for initial handshake message exchange and the extra control overhead for packet transmissions have stimulated the emergence of grant-free (GF) transmission. GF access provides a promising mechanism for carrying low and moderate traffic with small data and fits especially well for massive machine type communications (mMTC) applications. Despite a surge of interest in GF access, how to handle heterogeneous mMTC traffic based on GF mechanisms has not been investigated in depth. In this paper, we propose a priority enabled GF access scheme which performs dynamic slot allocation in each 5G new radio subframe to devices with different priority levels on a subframe-by-subframe basis. While high priority traffic has access privilege for slot occupancy, the remaining slots in the same subframe will be allocated to low priority traffic. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we develop a two-dimensional Markov chain model which integrates these two types of traffic via a pseudo-aggregated process. Furthermore, the model is validated through simulations and the performance of the scheme is evaluated both analytically and by simulations and compared with two other GF access schemes.
ISSN:0090-6778
1558-0857
DOI:10.1109/TCOMM.2021.3053990