Punctured Scheduling for Critical Low Latency Data on a Shared Channel with Mobile Broadband

Abstract

In this paper, we present a punctured scheduling scheme for efficient transmission of low latency communication (LLC) traffic, multiplexed on a downlink shared channel with enhanced mobile broadband traffic (eMBB). Puncturing allows to schedule eMBB traffic on all shared channel resources, without prior reservation of transmission resources for sporadically arriving LLC traffic. When LLC traffic arrives, it is immediately scheduled with a short transmission by puncturing part of the ongoing eMBB transmissions. To have this working efficiently, we propose recovery mechanisms for punctured eMBB transmissions, and a service-specific scheduling policy and link adaptation. Among others, we find that it is advantageous to include an element of eMBB-awareness for the scheduling decisions of the LLC transmissions (i.e. those that puncture ongoing eMBB transmissions), to primarily puncture eMBB transmission(s) that are transmitted with low modulation and coding scheme index. System level simulations are presented to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed solution.