Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications In MmWave For Factory Floor Automation

Automation enabled by ultra-reliable and low latency 5G connectivity is expected to transform the industrial landscape over the next decade. Given the spectrum crunch in bands below 6 GHz, there is significant interest in exploring the use of millimeter wave (mmWave) bands for industrial automation. The harsh propagation conditions at high frequencies raise questions about the viability of providing ultra-reliable and low latency connectivity in these bands. Furthermore, the use of analog beamforming with narrow beams implies limited frequency multiplexing opportunity despite the wider bandwidths available, which in turn results in larger waiting times for packet transmission. We study the propagation in a factory floor using ray tracing, which shows that received signal strength is sufficiently large even when the line-of-sight (LoS) signal is blocked. To improve the latency performance, we propose an adaptive beam selection method that chooses the best set of beams across multiple users to reduce the overall latency for all users. We show through simulations that our proposed greedy algorithm performs better than the state-of-the-art algorithm, and that there is more improvement possible.