Configured Grant for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications: Standardization and Beyond

Uplink configured Grant allocation has been introduced in Third Generation Partnership Project New Radio Release 15. This is beneficial in supporting Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication for industrial communication, a key Fifth Generation mobile communication usage scenario. This scheduling mechanism enables a user with periodic traffic to transmit its data readily and bypass the control signaling entailed to scheduling requests and scheduling grants and provides low latency access. To facilitate ultra-reliable communication, the scheduling mechanism can allow users to transmit consecutive redundant transmissions in a predefined period. However, if the traffic is semi-deterministic, the current standardized configured grant allocation is not equipped to emulate the traffic as the configured grant's period is preconfigured and fixed. This article describes the recent advancements in the standardization process in Release 15 and 16 for configured grant allocation and the prospective solutions to accommodate semi-deterministic traffic behavior for configured grant allocations.