Performance Evaluation of Latency for NB-LTE Networks in Industrial Automation

Low latency communication is essential to enable mission-critical machine-type communication (mMTC) use cases in cellular networks. Factory and process automation are major areas that require such low latency communication. In this paper, we investigate the potential of adopting the semi-persistent scheduling (SPS) latency reduction technique in narrowband LTE (NB-LTE) networks and provide a comprehensive performance evaluation. First, we investigate and implement SPS in an open-source network simulator (NS3). We perform simulations with a focus on LTE-M and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) systems and evaluate the impact of the SPS technique on the uplink latency of these narrowband systems in real industrial automation scenarios. The performance gain of adopting SPS is analyzed and the results is compared with the legacy dynamic scheduling. Our results show that SPS has the potential to reduce the latency of cellular Internet of Things (cIoT) networks. We believe that SPS can be integrated into LTE-M and NB-IoT systems to support low-latency industrial applications.