Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications In MmWave For Factory Floor Automation

Abstract

Automation enabled by ultra-reliable and low latency 5G connectivity
is expected to transform the industrial landscape over the next
decade. Given the spectrum crunch in bands below 6 GHz, there is significant interest in exploring the use of millimeter wave (mmWave) bands
for industrial automation. The harsh propagation conditions at high frequencies raise questions about the viability of providing ultra-reliable and
low latency connectivity in these bands. Furthermore, the use of analog
beamforming with narrow beams implies limited frequency multiplexing
opportunity despite the wider bandwidths available, which in turn results
in larger waiting times for packet transmission. We study the propagation
in a factory floor using ray tracing, which shows that received signal
strength is sufficiently large even when the line-of-sight (LoS) signal is
blocked. To improve the latency performance, we propose an adaptive
beam selection method that chooses the best set of beams across multiple
users to reduce the overall latency for all users. We show through
simulations that our proposed greedy algorithm performs better than the
state-of-the-art algorithm, and that there is more improvement possible.