System Level Analysis of Uplink Grant-Free Transmission for URLLC

In the context of 5'th Generation (5G) New Radio (NR), new transmission procedures are currently studied for supporting the challenging requirements of Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) use cases. In particular, grant free (GF) transmissions have the potential of reducing the latency with respect to traditional grant-based (GB) approaches as adopted in Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio standard. However, in case a shared channel is assigned to multiple users for GF transmissions, the occurrence of collisions may jeopardize the GF potential. In this paper, we perform a system analysis in a large urban macro network of several transmission procedures for uplink GF transmission presented in recent literature. Specifically, we study K-Repetitions and Proactive schemes along with the conventional HARQ scheme referred to as Reactive. We evaluated their performance against the baseline GB transmission as a function of the load using extensive and detailed system level simulations. Our findings show that GF procedures are capable of providing significant lower latency than GB at the reliability level of 1-e-5, even at considerable network loads. In particular, the GF Reactive scheme is shown to achieve the latency target while supporting at least 400 packets per second per cell.