Performance Evaluation of 5G Radio Configurations for Industry 4.0

The future Radio Access Network (RAN) is being engineered to accommodate the emergence of Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and to handle the possible coexistence between URLLC and enhanced Mobile Broad Band (eMBB) services. To achieve this, new features are being implemented in the future RAN to fulfill the strict requirements of the URLLC traffic in terms of latency and reliability. In this paper, we exploit the radio frame features in the New Radio (NR) and evaluate the users’ performances in Downlink (DL) scheme. We conduct extensive system level simulations in realistic network deployment considering the Industry 4.0 use case. We study the impact of 1) different radio configurations and 2) the dedication of a reserved bandwidth to the critical traffic, on the URLLC achieved user plane latency and packet loss probability. The coexistence of URLLC and eMBB traffic is also evaluated by measuring the eMBB users’ throughput.