Relay-Assisted Uplink Transmission Design of URLLC Packets

With the emergence and development of mission-critical applications, the design of uplink URLLC transmission has become one of the issues of concern. In this article, we consider the ultrareliable uplink transmission design between multiple robots and a central controller in a smart factory with stringent delay requirements while multiple relays are deployed for cooperative transmission. Subject to the throughput and reliability requirements, a relay-assisted two-phase transmission protocol is proposed aiming at total transmit power minimization by jointly optimizing the decoding error probability, relay selection, resource block (RB) assignment, and transmit power allocation. To support the mission-critical applications in Internet of Things (IoT) with diverse throughput targets and make full use of RBs, we investigate the optimization problem under the single-RB allocation and multi-RB allocation schemes. The problems in these two cases have an analogous structure and can be solved with a unified framework. In the solution framework, we present the optimal design solved by the nonconvex penalty (NCP)- and quadratic penalty (QP)-based successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithms and the corresponding low-complexity design with near-optimal settings of decoding error probabilities. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed penalty-based iterative algorithms and confirm that the near-optimal design only causes minor power performance loss compared to the optimal design. The power performance gap under these two allocation schemes and the impact of system parameters are revealed and analyzed.