Priority-based eMBB and URLLC traffic coexistence models in 5G NR industrial deployments

The technology 5G New Radio simultaneously supports both Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Service (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile Broadband Service (eMBB). Owing to extreme latency and reliability requirements of both types of services, a prioritization needs to be provided. The present authors consider an industrial environment where production equipment utilizes URLLC service for controlling motion and synchronous operation while eMBB service is used for remote monitoring. The authors proposed the model with priority service at base station (BS) with and without direct device-to-device (D2D) communications. The obtained numerical results indicate that priorities allow one to isolate URLLC and eMBB traffic efficiently. The D2D-aware strategy where the BS explicitly reserves resources for direct communications significantly outperforms strategies where explicit reservation is not utilized as well as the strategy where all the traffic goes through the BS.