Signaling Design for Cooperative Resource Allocation and Its Impact to Message Reliability

Decentralized cooperative resource allocation schemes for robotic swarms are essential to enable high reliability in high throughput data message exchanges. These cooperative schemes require control signaling to avoid half-duplex problems at the receiver and mitigate interference. We propose two cooperative resource allocation schemes, device sequential and group scheduling, and introduce a control signaling design. We observe that failure in the reception of these control signals leads to non-cooperative behavior and to significant performance degradation. The cause of these failures is identified, and specific countermeasures are proposed and evaluated through extensive system level simulations. The key performance indicators are data message reliability and the packet inter-reception metric. As our main reference, we compare the proposed resource allocation schemes against the NR sidelink mode 2 resource allocation, and show that despite signaling has a significant impact on resource allocation performance, our proposed device sequential and group scheduling resource allocation schemes improve reliability by an order of magnitude compared to sidelink mode 2.