Prioritized Service of URLLC Traffic in Industrial Deployments of 5G NR Systems

The simultaneous support of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable low latency (URLLC) traffic types at the air interface in upcoming 5G New Radio systems is a challenging problem requiring new connection admission control and scheduling strategies. To enable this coexistence while still maintaining the prescribed quality-of-service guarantees the state of the art solutions utilize non-orthogonal multiple access and traffic isolation with explicit resource reservation. In this paper, we study an explicit prioritization of URLLC traffic over other services. Using the tools of queuing theory we mathematically characterize and investigate several techniques for priority-based resource allocation. Our results demonstrate that preemptive priority service is a viable option to fulfill strict delay and loss guarantees at the NR air interface. We also show that elasticity of lower priority eMBB service allows for additional capacity gains in terms of the eMBB session drop probability during the service. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.