Robotic swarms are becoming relevant across different industries. In an indoor factory, collective perception of the environment can be used for increased factory automatization. It requires reliable, high throughput and low latency communication of broadcasted video data among robots within proximity.We introduce two new decentralized resource allocation schemes that meet these stringent requirements. The two proposed decentralized schemes are denoted as: (i) device sequential, where robots take turns to allocate resources, and (ii) group scheduling, where robots select local group leaders who perform the resource allocation. A comparative evaluation is performed by simulation against a centralized resource allocation scheme and the current 3GPP release 16 NR sidelink mode 2 scheme.Our results show that the two proposed decentralized resource allocation schemes outperform sidelink mode 2 due to the mitigation of the half-duplex problem. The proposed schemes reach the throughput target of 10 Mbps with a reliability of 99.99% for a swarm size of 50 robots.
High throughput, low latency, and high reliability in proximity communications for swarm robotics can be achieved using decentralized cooperative resource allocation schemes. These cooperative schemes minimize the occurrence of half-duplex problems, reduce interference, and allow a significant increase in the achievable swarm density, but requires additional signaling overhead, which makes them potentially more prone to performance degradation under realistic operation conditions. These conditions include both data, signaling, and their interdependence evaluated jointly. The negative impact of the signaling errors requires incorporating enhancement techniques to realize the full potential of the cooperative schemes. Particularly, in this paper and for this purpose, we evaluate the effects of hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ), link adaptation by aggregation (LAAG) and beam selection by using directional antennas in the cooperative schemes, and compare performance with 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) NR sidelink mode 2 (including signaling) using the same techniques. Additionally, we include a comparison of the required number of control signals between sidelink mode 2 inter-UE coordination (IUC) and cooperative schemes, and introduce a decentralized rebel sub-mode behavior in our group scheduling scheme to further improve the performance at the 99.99 percentile. The simultaneous use of all these enhancement techniques in our cooperative schemes considerably reduces the impact of signaling errors and thereby increases the supported swarm size compared to sidelink mode 2.
Decentralized cooperative resource allocation schemes for robotic swarms represents an alternative to infrastructure-based communications across different commercial, industrial and environmental protection use cases. The cooperative communication schemes, device sequential and group scheduling in [1], have shown superior performance in comparison to 5G NR sidelink mode 2, but have also shown performance issues due to signaling overhead and signaling induced failures. In this paper we introduce different techniques that reduce the failure probability of data packet transmissions and the packet inter-reception (PIR) time. We evaluate two techniques, respectively, of incremental redundancy using hybrid automatic repeat request and link adaptation by aggregation, as well as their combination for our decentralized cooperative resource allocation schemes and sidelink mode 2. Our results show that the introduced enhancements, allow to double the amount of supported swarm members while achieving four nines reliability when compared to the case where the same enhancements are applied to the sidelink mode 2.
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