MDP-based Resource Allocation for Uplink Grant-free Transmissions in 5G New Radio

The diversity of application scenarios in 5G mobile communication networks calls for innovative initial access schemes beyond traditional grant-based approaches. As a novel concept for facilitating small packet transmission and achieving ultra-low latency, grant-free communication is attracting lots of interests in the research community and standardization bodies. However, when a network consists of both grant based and grant-free based end devices, how to allocate slot resources properly between these two categories of devices remains as an unanswered question. In this paper, we propose a Markov decision process based scheme which dynamically allocates grant-free resources based on a specific reliability or priority requirement. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated via both analysis and simulations under various traffic arrival conditions.