WNL Lab Publishes the Pioneering Framework Enabling Massive URLLC Applications in 5G+ Systems

The WNL Lab shows the scientific results in the paper “A Framework to Maximize the Capacity of 5G Systems for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications” by Evgeny Khorov, Artem Krasilov, Ilya Selnitskiy, and Ian F. Akyildiz (published in the Q1 journal “IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing”).

In the publication, the WNL team describes a pioneering framework enabling Massive URLLC applications in 5G networks, which they have developed in 2018. Providing Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) is one of the key challenges for 5G systems, which requires the redesign of both radio access technologies and the architectures. While 3GPP and the research community focus mainly on radio low layer functionality and architectural changes that enable URLLC, this paper proposes a novel cross-layer framework that extends the already standardized 5G solutions to support a very massive number of users/flows in the system. The framework consists of a scheduler, a congestion avoidance algorithm and a new traffic management algorithm, which together achieve the maximum capacity of 5G systems for URLLC, i.e., they maximize the load at which the reliability and latency requirements are satisfied for at least 99% of the users. Extensive performance evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves the network capacity very close to the upper bound.

URLLC is one of the three main usage scenarios for 5G. It is envisioned as one of the enablers for future vertical applications such as industrial automation, remote robot control, e-health, autonomous driving, and so on. Such applications typically require that a wireless network shall deliver packets within a very short delay budget (less than 1 ms) and at the same time provide ultra-high reliability (higher than 99,999%).

URLLC is one of the main scientific directions for WNL Lab, which conducts research and organizes seminars to provide researchers and academics with the latest results in the field.

Wireless Networks Lab is a ‘Megagrant’ lab established in 2017 around the project on Cloudified Wireless Networks for 5G and beyond, led by Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz. The team regularly reports at leading IEEE conferences, runs industrial projects and contributes to the standardization of wireless networks.