Priority-based Coexistence of eMBB and URLLC Traffic in Industrial 5G NR Deployments

One of the most attractive use-cases for the 5G mobile cellular system is industrial automation. To this end, the newly standardized New Radio (NR) technology offers the support of both ultra-reliable low-latency (URLLC) service and conventional enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) service. Owning to extreme latency and reliability requirements, URLLC service needs to be provided an explicit prioritization. We consider the simultaneous support of these two services in an industrial environment, where manufacturing machinery utilizes URLLC service for motion control and synchronous operation while eMBB service is used for remote monitoring. By utilizing the tools of stochastic geometry and queuing theory, we formalize the model with preemptive priority service at NR base stations (BS). The considered key performance indicator is the density of NR BS. Our numerical results indicate that the proposed approach does provide perfect isolation for URLLC traffic even in a dynamically changing environment and the required reliability level for a given load may indeed be attained by the proper selection of NR BS density and NR BS antenna arrays. © 2020 IEEE.