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Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks will provide Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) to support critical processes underlying the production chains. However, standard protocols for allocating wireless resources may not optimize the latency-reliability trade-off, especially for uplink communication. For example, centralized grant-based scheduling can ensure almost zero collisions, but introduces delays in the way resources are requested by the User Equipments (UEs) and granted by the gNB. In turn, distributed scheduling (e.g., based on random access), in which UEs autonomously choose the resources for transmission, may lead to potentially many collisions especially when the traffic increases. In this work we propose DIStributed combinatorial NEural linear Thompson Sampling (DISNETS), a novel scheduling framework that combines the best of the two worlds. By leveraging a feedback signal from the gNB and reinforcement learning, the UEs are trained to autonomously optimize their uplink transmissions by selecting the available resources to minimize the number of collisions, without additional message exchange to/from the gNB. DISNETS is a distributed, multi-agent adaptation of the Neural Linear Thompson Sampling (NLTS) algorithm, which has been further extended to admit multiple parallel actions. We demonstrate the superior performance of DISNETS in addressing URLLC in IIoT scenarios compared to other baselines.

This paper investigates the resource allocation algorithm design for wireless systems assisted by large intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) with coexisting enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) users. We consider a two-time scale resource allocation scheme, whereby the base station's precoders are optimized in each mini-slot to adapt to newly arriving URLLC traffic, whereas the IRS phase shifts are reconfigured only in each time slot to avoid excessive base station-IRS signaling. To facilitate efficient resource allocation design for large IRSs, we employ a codebook-based optimization framework, where the IRS is divided into several tiles and the phase-shift elements of each tile are selected from a pre-defined codebook. The resource allocation algorithm design is formulated as an optimization problem for the maximization of the average sum data rate of the eMBB users over a time slot while guaranteeing the quality-of-service (QoS) of each URLLC user in each mini-slot. An iterative algorithm based on alternating optimization (AO) is proposed to find a high-quality suboptimal solution. As a case study, the proposed algorithm is applied in an industrial indoor environment modelled via the Quadriga channel simulator. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm design enables the coexistence of eMBB and URLLC users and yields large performance gains compared to three baseline schemes. Furthermore, our simulation results reveal that the proposed two-time scale resource allocation design incurs only a small performance loss compared to the case when the IRSs are optimized in each mini-slot., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 Table, and submitted for an IEEE conference publication

In this paper, we focus on large intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) and propose a new codebook construction method to obtain a set of pre-designed phase-shift configurations for the IRS unit cells. Since the complexity of online optimization and the overhead for channel estimation scale with the size of the phase-shift codebook, the design of small codebooks is of high importance. We consider both continuous and discrete phase-shift designs and formulate the codebook construction as optimization problems. To solve the optimization problems, we propose an optimal algorithm for the discrete phase-shift design and a low-complexity sub-optimal solution for the continuous design. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms facilitate the construction of codebooks of different sizes and with different beamwidths. Moreover, the performance of the discrete phaseshift design with 2-bit quantization is shown to approach that of the continuous phase-shift design. Finally, our simulation results show that the proposed designs enable large transmit power savings compared to the existing linear and quadratic codebook designs [1], [2]., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

The fifth generation of cellular communication systems is foreseen to enable a multitude of new applications and use cases with very different requirements. A new 5G multiservice air interface needs to enhance broadband performance as well as provide new levels of reliability, latency and supported number of users. In this paper we focus on the massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) service within a multi-service air interface. Specifically, we present an overview of different physical and medium access techniques to address the problem of a massive number of access attempts in mMTC and discuss the protocol performance of these solutions in a common evaluation framework.

OFDM-based waveforms with filtering or windowing functionalities are considered key enablers for a flexible air-interface design for multi-service support in future 5G systems. One candidate from this category of waveforms is pulse shaped OFDM, which follows the idea of subcarrier filtering and aims at fully maintaining the advantages of standard OFDM systems while addressing their drawbacks. In this paper, we elaborate on several pulse shaping design methods, and show how pulse shapes can be exploited as an additional degree of freedom to provide better frequency localization and more efficient spectrum utilization under a pre-defined spectrum mask. The performance analysis and evaluation results show that, for a practical mobile communication systems, the application of pulse shaping is a simple and effective means to achieve a lower out-of-band leakage for OFDM systems at virtually no costs. In fact, the complexity increase amounts to 1-2% compared to CP-OFDM only. In addition, the system's robustness against both time and frequency distortions is shown to be substantially improved by a proper pulse shape design. By allowing for the flexible configuration of physical layer parameters per sub-band according to the diverse requirements of future 5G services, pulse shaped OFDM systems can efficiently facilitate asynchronous transmissions and fragmented spectrum access, rendering it beneficial for various mobile-broadband and Internet-of-Things applications., Comment: Minor revision of abstract, introduction, section II/VI, Appendix A, and conclusion