A Downlink Puncturing Scheme for Simultaneous Transmission of URLLC and eMBB Traffic by Exploiting Data Similarity

Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) is deemed to be an essential service in 5G systems and beyond (also called 6G) to accommodate a wide range of emerging applications with stringent latency and reliability requirements. Coexistence of URLLC alongside other service categories calls for developing spectrally efficient multiplexing techniques. Specifically, coupling URLLC and conventional enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) through superposition/puncturing naturally arises as a promising option due to the tolerance of the latter in terms of latency and reliability. The idea here is to transmit URLLC packets (typically sporadic and of short size) over resources occupied by ongoing eMBB transmissions while minimizing the impact on the eMBB transmissions. In this paper, we propose a novel downlink URLLC-eMBB multiplexing technique that exploits possible similarities among URLLC and eMBB symbols, with the objective of reducing the size of the punctured eMBB symbols. We propose that the base station (BS) scans the eMBB traffic’ symbol sequences and punctures those that have the highest symbol similarity with that of the URLLC users to be served. As the eMBB and URLLC may use different constellation sizes, we introduce the concept of symbol region similarity to accommodate the different constellations. We assess the performance of the proposed scheme analytically, where we derive closed-form expressions for the symbol error rate (SER) of the eMBB and URLLC services. We also derive an expression for the eMBB loss function due to puncturing in terms of the eMBB SER. We demonstrate through numerical and simulation results the efficacy of the proposed scheme where we show that 1) the eMBB spectral efficiency is improved by puncturing fewer symbols, 2) the SER and reliability performance of eMBB are improved, and 3) the URLLC data is accommodated within the specified delay constraint while maintaining its reliability, 4) and the proposed strategy has linear time complexity making it an efficient solution to be used in practice.