Efficient Traffic Scheduling for Coexistence of eMBB and uRLLC in Industrial IoT Networks

Ultra-reliable low-latency communication (uRLLC) is envisioned to efficiently support mission-critical scenarios, especially for industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Considering the requirements of high throughput and massive connectivity in machine-type communications, uRLLC traffic is usually coexisted with enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services for the data-intensive industrial cases. To strike a balance between the two distinct tasks, this paper investigates a multi-objective optimization problem by taking into account the performance of both uRLLC and eMBB. Specifically, we aim at maximizing eMBB data rate and uRLLC reliability, while minimizing the communication overhead of control channels caused by uRLLC puncturing. To solve this challenging problem, an analytic hierarchy process method is adopted to estimate the importance of each objective with expert knowledge. Then, a coalitional game is invoked to evaluate the preference degree of resource blocks allocated to uRLLC devices. Following this, an improved Gale-Shapley algorithm is proposed for efficient traffic scheduling. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better performance in terms of eMBB throughput and uRLLC reliability with the reduced signal overhead.