How will 5G transform industrial IoT: Latency and reliability analysis

Abstract

5G technology, with many services it will provide, will serve as an accelerator for the digital transformation of manufacturers. Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLC) is a new service category in 5G to accommodate emerging services and applications having stringent latency and reliability requirements. The new 5G radio techniques, which will considerably improve the latency and reliability of communications, are indeed keys to meeting the needs of the industrial world. In this paper, we have covered the use of 5G technology through its uRLLC service in the industrial internet world. First, we determined the sufficient bandwidth to serve each uRLLC user who requires very low latency and very high reliability with strict quality of service. Then we defined the latency in the user plane between the base station and each 5G NR (New Radio) user, in case the transmission is successful with or without retransmission (HARQ). According to ITU, controlling devices (such as industrial robots) requires an end to end latency which is significantly less than one millisecond. Considering a massive IoT deployment, every single sensor must be accessed within a stringent end-to-end latency period. Simulations show that the introduction of the mini-slot concept for very short packets in uRLLC allows very short latency times.