The future connectivity landscape, and notably, the 5G wireless systems will feature Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC). The coupling of high reliability and low latency requirements in URLLC use cases makes the wireless access design very challenging, in terms of both the protocol design and of the associated transmission techniques. This paper aims to provide a broad perspective on the fundamental tradeoffs in URLLC, as well as the principles used in building access protocols. Two specific technologies are considered in the context of URLLC: massive MIMO and multi-connectivity, also termed interface diversity . This paper also touches on the importance of the proper statistical methodology for designing and assessing extremely high-reliability levels.
Industrial applications aimed at real-time control and monitoring of cyber-physical systems pose significant challenges to the underlying communication networks in terms of determinism, low latency, and high reliability. The migration of these networks from wired to wireless could bring several benefits in terms of cost reduction and simplification of design, but currently available wireless techniques cannot cope with the stringent requirements of the most critical applications. In this paper, we consider the problem of designing a high-performance wireless network for industrial control, targeting at Gbps data rates and 10- @math s-level cycle time. To this aim, we start from analyzing the required performance and deployment scenarios, then we take a look at the most advanced standards and emerging trends that may be applicable. Building on this investigation, we outline the main directions for the development of a wireless high-performance system. While the current generation of mobile and fixed communication networks has been standardized for mobile broadband services, the next generation is driven by the vision of the Internet of Things and mission-critical communication services requiring latency in the order of milliseconds or submilliseconds. However, these new stringent requirements have a large technical impact on the design of all layers of the communication protocol stack. The cross-layer interactions are complex due to the multiple design principles and technologies that contribute to the layers’ design and fundamental performance limitations. We will be able to develop low-latency networks only if we address the problem of these complex interactions from the new point of view of submilliseconds latency. In this paper, we propose a holistic analysis and classification of the main design principles and enabling technologies that will make it possible to deploy low-latency wireless communication networks. We argue that these design principles and enabling technologies must be carefully orchestrated to meet the stringent requirements and to manage the inherent tradeoffs between low latency and traditional performance metrics. We also review currently ongoing standardization activities in prominent standards associations, and discuss open problems for future research. URLLC is an important new feature brought by 5G, with a potential to support a vast set of applications that rely on mission-critical links. In this article, we first discuss the principles for supporting URLLC from the perspective of the traditional assumptions and models applied in communication information theory. We then discuss how these principles are applied in various elements of system design, such as use of various diversity sources, design of packets, and access protocols. The important message is that there is a need to optimize the transmission of signaling information, as well as a need for lean use of various sources of diversity. High-fidelity, real-time interactive applications are envisioned with the emergence of the Internet of Things and tactile Internet by means of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Exploiting time diversity for fulfilling the URLLC requirements in an energy efficient manner is a challenging task due to the nontrivial interplay among packet size, retransmission rounds and delay, and transmit power. In this paper, we study the fundamental energy-latency tradeoff in URLLC systems employing incremental redundancy (IR) hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ). We cast the average energy minimization problem with a finite blocklength (latency) constraint and feedback delay, which is non-convex. We propose a dynamic programming algorithm for energy efficient IR-HARQ optimization in terms of number of retransmissions, blocklength, and power per round. Numerical results show that our IR-HARQ approach could provide around 25 energy saving compared with one-shot transmission (no HARQ).