Age of Information Performance of Ultra Reliable Low Latency Service in 5G New Radio Networks

Ultra-reliable low latency (URLLC) service is one of the cornerstone services that needs to be supported in fifth-generation (5G) cellular systems. For a class of applications utilizing URLLC service – periodic state updates, a vital metric of interest is Age of Information (AoI) characterizing the timeliness of updates received. The analysis of latency-related metrics in 5G cellular systems is however complicated by the orthogonal-frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) specifics resulting in batch service of packets. In this paper, we formalize the solve a queueing model capturing the specifics of URLLC service over OFDMA-enabled systems by explicitly accounting for batch service. For this model, we derive the mean peak AoI (PAoI). Our numerical results demonstrate, that the PAoI behavior is mainly dictated by the loss performance required by the URLLC service. Specifically, the difference between PAoI is minimal often less than 10%. Thus, we conclude that when the loss guarantees are satisfied, the mean PAoI is insensitive to the choice of system parameters. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.