Interference-Aware Radio Resource Allocation for 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication

Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) is one of the main challenges faced by future 5G networks to enable mission-critical IoT use-case scenarios. High reliability can be achieved by reducing the requirement of achievable rates, therefore, results in reduced spectral efficiency. Retransmission has been introduced for 5G or beyond, to achieve reliability with improved spectral efficiency at the cost of increased packet latency. Keeping in mind, the trade-off between reliability and latency, in this paper, we have proposed an interference-aware radio resource (IARR) allocation for uplink transmission by formulating a sum-rate maximization problem. The aim of the proposed algorithm is to improve the link quality to achieve high reliability for future 5G networks resulting in reduced retransmissions and packet latency. To reduce the computation complexity of the maximization problem in achieving the globally optimal solution, we propose a progressive interference-aware heuristic solution. The proposed solution is then investigated to evaluate the impact of retransmission and inter-cell interference on the average information rate and latency of the considered multi-cell cellular network. The performance of IARR algorithm is then compared with the conventional round-robin scheduling (RRS). Significant improvement in the link reliability along with the reduction in latency has been observed with IARR algorithm. The results illustrate that the IARR algorithm improves the average rate by 7% and latency by 10% compared to RRS.