Mixed-criticality Industrial Data Scheduling on 5G NR

Compared to industrial wired networks, 5G can improve device mobility and reduce the cost of networking. However, the real-time performance and reliability of 5G NR (new radio) still need to be improved to satisfy industrial applications’ requirements. In factories, the main factor that affects the performance of 5G NR is the unstable signal quality caused by high temperatures and metal. Although assigning dedicated resources to all transmissions and retransmissions is an effective method to improve the performance of 5G NR, the unstable signal quality causes the resources required for retransmissions to be uncertain. To address the problem, we introduce the mixed-criticality task model to 5G NR. When high-criticality packets cannot be transmitted, they are allowed to preempt the resources shared with low-criticality packets. The mixed-criticality scheduling problem of 5G NR is NP-hard. We formulate it as an OMT (optimization modulo theories) specification and propose a scheduling algorithm based on bin packing methods to make 5G NR satisfy industrial applications’ requirements. Finally, we conduct extensive evaluations based on an industrial 5G testbed and random test cases. The evaluation results indicate that our algorithm makes communication reliability greater than 99.9% on unlicensed spectrum, and for most test cases, our algorithm is close to optimal solutions.