Ultrareliable and Low-Latency Wireless Communication: Tail, Risk, and Scale

Abstract

Ensuring ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) for 5G wireless networks and beyond is of capital importance and is currently receiving tremendous attention in academia and industry. At its core, URLLC mandates a departure from expected utility-based network design approaches, in which relying on average quantities (e.g., average throughput, average delay and average response time) is no longer an option but a necessity. Instead, a principled and scalable framework which takes into account delay, reliability, packet size, network architecture, and topology (across access, edge, and core) and decisionmaking under uncertainty is sorely lacking. The overarching goal of this article is a first step to fill this void.Towards this vision, after providing definitions of latency and reliability, we closely examine various enablers of URLLC and their inherent tradeoffs. Subsequently, we focus our attention on a plethora of techniques and methodologies pertaining to the requirements of ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, as well as their applications through selected use cases. These results provide crisp insights for the design of lowlatency and high-reliable wireless networks. Index TermsUltra-reliable low-latency communication, 5G and beyond, resource optimization, mobile edge computing. I. IntroductionThe phenomenal growth of data traffic spurred by the internet-of-things (IoT) applications ranging from machine-type communications (MTC) to mission-critical communications (autonomous driving, drones and augmented/virtual reality) are posing unprecedented challenges in terms of capacity, latency, reliability, and [4]. This is further exacerbated by: i) a growing network size and increasing interactions between nodes; ii) a high level of uncertainty due to random changes in the topology; and iii) a heterogeneity across applications, networks and devices. The stringent requirements of these new applications warrant a paradigm shift from reactive and centralized networks towards massive, low-latency, ultra-reliable and M. Bennis is with the Centre for wireless communications,

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