On the Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications in Flexible TDD/FDD 5G Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the feasibility of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) in 5G networks, comparing flexible TDD and FDD systems, and provides insights into outage performance under various deployment scenarios.

Contribution

It offers a system-level analysis of URLLC outage performance in flexible TDD 5G systems, comparing with FDD and different design variants, highlighting the potential of flexible-FDD technology.

Findings

URLLC targets are challenging in TDD due to switching and interference.

Flexible FDD can meet URLLC outage requirements more effectively.

Analysis provides guidelines for 5G URLLC deployment strategies.

Abstract

The ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) is the key driver of the current 5G new radio standardization. URLLC encompasses sporadic and small-payload transmissions that should be delivered within extremely tight radio latency and reliability bounds, i.e., a radio latency of 1 ms with 99.999% success probability. However, such URLLC targets are further challenging in the 5G dynamic time division duplexing (TDD) systems, due to the switching between the uplink and downlink transmission opportunities and the additional inter-cell cross-link interference (CLI). This paper presents a system level analysis of the URLLC outage performance within the 5G new radio flexible TDD systems. Specifically, we study the feasibility of the URLLC outage targets compared to the case with the 5G frequency division duplexing (FDD), and with numerous 5G design variants. The presented results therefore offer valuable observations on the URLLC outage performance in such deployments, and hence, introducing the state-of-the-art flexible-FDD technology.