Control and data channel combining in Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication

5G will be supporting new services that have remarkably higher requirements than LTE 4G and Ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) is one of those emerged categories. Although various techniques have been proposed to improve the data reliability, there has been a gap in how to improve the reliability of control/scheduling information pointing to the scheduled data. In this paper, we propose an intelligent combining of retransmissions of physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) and the physical downlink data channel (PDSCH). In the proposed scheme, the downlink control information (DCI) on PDCCH already indicates the location of a potential retransmission of the corresponding PDSCH. Moreover, the retransmitted DCI can be combined with the first transmission so that resource consumption and latency are reduced compared to the conventional scheme. Theoretical calculations and simulation results show a decrease of resource consumption.