Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications

Assembly Line

Collaborating for the World's First 5.5G URLLC Production Line

URLLC Enables 5G to be Embedded into Industrial Production Processes

đź“… Date:

✍️ Author: Guang Yang

đź”– Topics: 5G, Ultra-reliable Low Latency Communications

🏢 Organizations: Omdia, Intel, Quanta Computer


Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and advanced industrial robotics have been broadly deployed in today’s flexible manufacturing systems, often requiring very low communication latency and high reliability, such as 5 milliseconds (ms) end-to-end latency and 99.99% reliability for the operation of AGVs. The “augmented worker” is emerging in modern industrial processes, which entails a remote task expert providing guidance and support for field workers through augmented reality (AR) devices. The use case usually requires 10ms end-to-end latency and 99.99% reliability. However, wireline solutions will not be applicable for these use cases because mobility is also a critical requirement of each scenario.

The first mobile communications system natively designed with URLLC features is 5G. A flexible frame structure was specified in 3GPP Release 15 to enable low-latency communications. The transmission time interval (TTI) can scale from 1ms down to ~140 microseconds (a microsecond is equal to one millionth of a second) for URLLC cases. The maximum number of retransmissions can be adjusted from four to two to meet the latency requirement. The 5G standard also allows the creation of a “mini-slot” with the minimum set to only two symbols (against 14 symbols for a full slot in the usual case), which can provide fine scheduling granularity to reduce transmission latency.

Read more at ITPro Today