5G Wireless Network Slicing for eMBB, URLLC, and mMTC: A Communication-Theoretic View

Abstract

The grand objective of 5G wireless technology is to support three generic services with vastly heterogeneous requirements: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Service heterogeneity can be accommodated by network slicing, through which each service is allocated resources to provide performance guarantees and isolation from the other services. Slicing of the Radio Access Network (RAN) is typically done by means of orthogonal resource allocation among the services. This work studies the potential advantages of allowing for non-orthogonal sharing of RAN resources in uplink communications from a set of eMBB, mMTC and URLLC devices to a common base station. The approach is referred to as Heterogeneous Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (H-NOMA), in contrast to the conventional NOMA techniques that involve users with homogeneous requirements and hence can be investigated through a standard multiple access channel. The study devises a communication-theoretic model that accounts for the heterogeneous requirements and characteristics of the three services. The concept of reliability diversity is introduced as a design principle that leverages the different reliability requirements across the services in order to ensure performance guarantees with non-orthogonal RAN slicing. This study reveals that H-NOMA can lead, in some regimes, to significant gains in terms of performance trade-offs among the three generic services as compared to orthogonal slicing.

Non-Orthogonal Contention-Based Access for URLLC Devices with Frequency Diversity

“…Machine-Type Communication (MTC) is one of the main technologies in 5th Generation (5G) mobile communication. Within this very general category, we can distinguish two main use cases [1] with widely differing requirements-massive MTC (mMTC), capable of supporting a large number of sporadically communicating devices, possibly battery-operated, and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) enabling mission-critical MTC. Of the two, the latter especially has been igniting researchers' imaginations, as it would enable the implementation applications previously unattainable and considered futuristic, such as self-driving cars, remote surgery and telemetry, and more [2].…”

Saddlepoint Approximations for Short-Packet Wireless Communications

“…For simplicity, we shall restrict ourselves to codes whose blocklength n satisfies n = LT , where L denotes the number of coherence intervals of length T needed to transmit the entire codeword. An (M, L, T, , ρ)-code for the channel (2) consists of:…”

Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity

“…As introduced in Section II-B, network slicing is a key feature of 5G for the support of heterogeneous services. In the RAN, the conventional approach to slice is to allocate orthogonal radio resources to eMBB, with very long payloads; mMTC, characterized by the large amount of devices and the need of a random access; and URLLC, with small packets and low latency requirements [18]. The multiplexing in space of such services with very different characteristics and requirements brings major challenges.…”