An Efficient Packet Scheduling Algorithm for URLLC Systems

Abstract

Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) is one of the most important service classes of the emerging 5G and beyond communications systems. This service is used for various applications including medical and healthcare, industrial automation, transportation and robotics where both latency and reliability is of paramount importance. To ensure very low latency, most widely used method is to use short packet size. For ensuring latency and reliability requirement, designing efficient scheduling mechanism is a major challenge. In this work, we propose an efficient packet scheduling algorithm for downlink data transmission. The algorithm provides the highest priority to the packets with largest weighted delay based quantity. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated against some key performance metrics and compared with existing well known scheduling scheme such as proportional fair (PF) and exponential proportional fair (EPF) schemes. The results show the superiority of the proposed packet scheduling algorithm compared to the above mentioned existing schemes.