URLLC for Factory Automation: an Extensive Throughput-Reliability Analysis of D-MIMO

Factory automation is one of the most challenging use cases for 5G-and-beyond mobile networks due to strict latency, availability and reliability constraints. In this paper, communication with active actuators (ACs) inside an indoor industrial factory scenario is considered, and distributed multipleinput multiple-output (D-MIMO) systems are used in order to improve the communication reliability.We consider two transmission schemes, namely joint transmission, where all the distributed antennas are used for communicating with each AC, and single access point transmission, wherein, instead, each AC is served only by a subset of the active antennas. Link adaptation (LA) based on a proper choice of the modulation and coding scheme is also included in our analysis. Extensive numerical results are presented targeting various performance indicators, including the achievable sum spectral efficiency against the target block error rate, the number of ACs supported at a given reliability level, and finally, the effect of LA. The results demonstrate substantial performance improvements offered by D-MIMO in indoor factory scenarios.