Multiplexing of latency-critical communication and mobile broadband on a shared channel

This paper presents solutions for efficient multiplexing of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) and enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) traffic on a shared downlink channel. Such a scenario presents multiple challenges in the context of radio resource scheduling, link adaptation and inter-cell interference, which are identified and addressed throughout the paper. Specifically, a joint link adaptation and resource allocation technique is proposed that dynamically adjusts the block error probability (BLEP) of the URLLC payload transmissions in accordance with the instantaneous experienced load per cell. Extensive system-level simulations of the downlink performance show promising gains of this technique, reducing the URLLC latency from 1.3 ms to 1 ms at the 99.999% percentile, with less than 10% degradation of the eMBB throughput performance as compared to conventional scheduling policies.