Analyzing Novel Grant-Based and Grant-Free Access Schemes for Small Data Transmission

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework to compare grant-based and grant-free small data transmission schemes in 5G, revealing that 2-step schemes offer higher success rates and lower energy use, especially at low device densities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spatio-temporal analytical model for 4/2-step SDT RA schemes, enabling performance evaluation and comparison with benchmark schemes in 5G NR.

Findings

2-step SDT RA scheme achieves highest success probability.

2-step SDT RA scheme has lowest energy consumption.

Performance gains diminish with increased device density.

Abstract

Fifth Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) does not support data transmission during random access (RA) procedures, which results in unnecessary control signalling overhead and power consumption, especially for small data transmission (SDT). Motivated by this, 3GPP has proposed 4/2-step SDT RA schemes based on the existing grant-based (4-step) and grant-free (2-step) RA schemes, with the aim to enable data transmission during RA procedures in Radio Resource Control (RRC) Inactive state. To compare the 4/2-step SDT RA schemes with the benchmark 4/2-step RA schemes, we provide a spatio-temporal analytical framework to evaluate the RA schemes, which jointly models the preamble detection, Physical Uplink Shared Channel (PUSCH) decoding, and data transmission procedures. Based on this analytical model, we derive the analytical expressions for the overall packet transmission success probability and average throughput in each RACH attempt. We also derive the average energy consumption in each RACH attempt. Our results show that 2-step SDT RA scheme provides the highest overall packet transmission success probability, and the lowest average energy consumption, but the performance gain decreases with the increase of device intensity.