Performance Evaluation of Grant-Free Transmission for Uplink URLLC Services

5G wireless networks are expected to support new applications demanding ultra high reliability and ultra low latency, such as self-driving cars, industrial control, and real-time gaming. Such services are known as ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) targeting at 99.999% transmission correctness within 1 ms delay bound. Current Long Term Evolution (LTE) system is far from supporting such services, especially for uplink. Even with around 10 times shortened transmission interval, due to the waste of time in requesting and receiving the scheduling grant, only one shot uplink transmission can be supported within 1 ms, which is very hard to meet the reliability requirement. Grant-Free transmission is thus proposed to effectively save the time of requesting/waiting for grant and thus relax the transmission interval design in frame structure. This paper presents the design of grant-free transmission for URLLC services and also the evaluation results. We shall show that the saved time can be used for more Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) retransmissions and thus further enhance the reliability. Moreover, contention based grant-free transmission with proper HARQ design can well meet the reliability requirement. Finally, the performance can be further enhanced with non-orthogonal multiple access schemes such as Sparse Code Multiple Access (SCMA) and advanced receivers such as Message Passing Algorithm (MPA) or Expectation Propagation Algorithm (EPA) receiver.