Beam Selection for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication in Industrial Environment with Beamforming Repeaters

This paper investigates the use of beamforming millimeter-wave (mmWave) repeaters in wireless industrial control systems. We study deployment of mmWave in a factory floor with several production lines and a multitude of devices that periodically receive packets from the controller via a hub access point (AP). We propose to use beamforming repeaters as an alternative to the so-called multi-transmission reception point (multi-TRP) technology, where wireless fronthaul links from the hub TRP to the repeaters substitute the bulky wired links to the different TRPs. The proposed wireless TRP is then demonstrated to extend communication coverage across the factory floor, while improving end-to-end link reliability via over-the-air combining of the signal from the repeater and the hub TRP. We formulate the optimization problem of associating TRPs and beams to each user for the objective of minimizing the overall scheduling latency while satisfying reliable communication to all users. To tackle such a problem, we propose a low-complexity greedy algorithm, which through extensive simulations is shown to significantly reduce system- level scheduling latency compared to the existing schemes in the literature. In our simulations, the effects of most objects on radio wave propagation are accurately modeled using a ray-tracing tool.