System Level Integration of Irregular Repetition Slotted ALOHA for Industrial IoT in 5G New Radio

Automation is a key part of the new industrial revolution, that will be enabled by the deployment of thousands of sensors and actuators. The flexible deployment of these devices requires wireless connectivity which is labeled as industrial internet of things, IIoT. The sporadic activity pattern of IIoT devices naturally suggest the use of random access techniques, albeit posing new and unexplored challenges for the current wireless networks. On top of the demand for new access protocols, the latency-reliability requirements further challenge the existing random access protocols. In this work we investigate the adaptation of a well known modern random access algorithm, Irregular Repetition Slotted ALOHA (IRSA) to IIoT in 5G New Radio. The key contribution of the paper is the proposed system level protocol, Adaptive-Multichannel IRSA, that can fulfill the latency-reliability requirements. On top of this, the definition and solution of the resource allocation problem as a resource efficiency optimization guarantees that the algorithm minimizes the system resources. We show that for a set of specific requirements, AMC-IRSA can fulfill the requirements in a lot resource efficient manner. Lastly, we analyze most critical parameters to consider for integration of IRSA for 5G NR.