# On Throughput Maximization of Grant-Free Access with Reliability-Latency Constraints

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes how knowledge of user arrival rates affects throughput in grant-free wireless access under strict reliability and latency constraints, highlighting the benefits of user number estimation for improved network performance.

## Contribution

It formulates the throughput of grant-free access with reliability-latency constraints considering different levels of knowledge about user arrivals and demonstrates the benefits of user number estimation.

## Key findings

- Throughput improves significantly with known user count at high load.
- Estimation errors still allow substantial throughput gains under strict requirements.
- Knowledge of actual user arrivals enhances grant-free access efficiency.

## Abstract

Enabling autonomous driving and industrial automation with wireless networks poses many challenges, which are typically abstracted through reliability and latency requirements. One of the main contributors to latency in cellular networks is the reservation-based access, which involves lengthy and resource-inefficient signaling exchanges. An alternative is to use grant-free access, in which there is no resource reservation. A handful of recent works investigated how to fulfill reliability and latency requirements with different flavors of grant-free solutions. However, the resource efficiency, i.e., the throughput, has been only the secondary focus. In this work, we formulate the throughput of grant-free access under reliability-latency constraints, when the actual number of arrived users or only the arrival distribution are known. We investigate how these different levels of knowledge about the arrival process influence throughput performance of framed slotted ALOHA with $K$-multipacket reception, for the Poisson and Beta arrivals. We show that the throughput under reliability-latency requirements can be significantly improved for the higher expected load of the access network, if the actual number of arrived users is known. This insight motivates the use of techniques for the estimation of the number of arrived users, as this knowledge is not readily available in grant-free access. We also asses the impact of estimation error, showing that for high reliability-latency requirements the gains in throughput are still considerable.