Performance of Priority-Based Traffic Coexistence Strategies in 5G mmWave Industrial Deployments

Recently standardized New Radio (NR) technology supports both ultra-reliable low-latency (URLLC) service and conventional enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) service. Owing to extreme latency and reliability requirements an explicit prioritization needs to be provided to URLLC service when these traffic types are mixed up at the air interface. In this work, we consider simultaneous support of these two services in an industrial environment, where production line equipment utilizes URLLC service for reorganization 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 pre-emptive priority service at NR base station (BS) with and without direct device-to-device (D2D) communications. Our numerical results indicate that the priority-based implementation of URLLC and eMBB coexistence allows us to isolate the former traffic efficiently and requires no external control. D2D-aware strategy, where the BS explicitly reserves some resources for direct communications, drastically outperforms those, where no explicit reservation is utilized, as well as the baseline strategy where all the traffic goes through the BS. This strategy can achieve 10−5 of URLLC drop probability when the baseline strategy produces just 5\times 10^-3 , leading to three orders of magnitude reduction in drop probability and without significant impact produced on eMBB session drop probability. The developed model can be utilized to estimate the NR BS density required to support prescribed performance guarantees for all the considered strategies.