한국통신학회 2016년도 동계종합학술발표회

Candidate Technologies for 5G Low-latency Communications

Yujing He and KyungHi Chang*

Electronic Engineering Department, Inha University

hyj13640561704@163.com and khchang@inha.ac.kr*

Abstract
Though low-latency service scenario in 5G mobile communications draws lots of attention, the delay in current
mobile communication systems is much larger than the requirements by 5G low-latency applications. In order
to achieve the 1 ms end-to-end latency target of 5G, various low-latency techniques have been proposed. Along
with a brief introduction for the low-latency services, we study and introduce several candidate technologies for
the low-latency communications including new waveforms, random access based on compressive sensing, and
the efficient network architectures.

I. Introduction
In recent years, 5G draws wide attention as a next-
generation mobile communications. Enhanced mobile broad
band, massive machine type communication and ultra-
reliable & low-latency communication will be the main
applications of 5G communication scenarios. The biggest
difference in 5G system is that by enabling low-latency
communications can not only connect people but also
connect the machines and devices, which may change our
life thoroughly. Along with the brief introduction for the low-
latency service in 5G, this survey paper present an overview
of several candidate technologies which might be applied
into low-latency communications.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows : In section Ⅱ,
we introduce the low-latency service development trends. In
section Ⅲ , we present new waveforms suitable for low-
latency transmissions. In section Ⅳ , we introduce the
compressive sensing based random access to decrease the
access delay. In section Ⅴ , we introduce the efficient
network architecture to reduce the delay in the core network,
and finally in section Ⅵ, we conclude this paper.
applications are called the Tactile Internet [1], as this is the
typical interaction latency required for tactile steering and
control of real and virtual objects. End-to-end latency
distribution based on Tactile Internet is shown in Fig. 1.
B. Low-latency Applications
With many companies recently announced the
development of the autonomous car, it is expected that the
autonomous car may become the most popular application
in 5G. If fully automatic driving can be realized, there is no
need to use traffic lights as vehicles could get through
intersections without crashing and pedestrians could cross
roads safely, which makes sure no car hits the person.
Furthermore, the low latency applications can be applied to
the Flying Ad-Hoc Network (FANET) that also require small
communication delay between drones to efficiently transfer
the commands from the control center. In addition, industrial
process automation and remote surgery, which requires zero
mistake and strict delay requirement [2] are also the typical
examples of low-latency use cases.
Transmitter 100 μs

Sensor
II. 5G Low-latency Service Requirements
Receiver 100 μs

A. End-to-end Latency Requirements

Actuator
1 ms
The next generation communication system requires 100 μs
extremely short end-to-end latency, i.e., from the terminals End-to-end Per direction
latency 300 μs Air interface 500 μs
through the network and then back to the terminals within 1 distribution
Network processing
ms. When the 1 ms latency can be achieved, then many new Device processing
Fig. 1. End-to-end latency distribution based on Tactile Internet.
breakthrough mobile applications become viable. These

*Address correspondence to Prof. KyungHi Chang.

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 한국통신학회 2016년도 동계종합학술발표회

III. Waveforms Suitable for Low-latency Transmissions Subsymbol 0

QAM Upsampler g0,0[n]
0
Obviously, to achieve the end-to-end latency within 1 ms, … ΩK …
N
…
Upsampler
the physical transmission delay in air interface cannot K-1 QAM N gK-1,0[n]

exceed 100 μs, which limit the packet duration to less than Subsymbol 1

S/P Converter
Upsampler
Data K QAM N
g0,1[n]
33 μs. Unfortunately, the symbol duration of one orthogonal Bits
… … ΩK … ∑
Upsampler
frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbol used in 2K-1 QAM N gK-1,1[n] Add CP

current LTE cellular system is close to 70 μs. This clearly

Subsymbol M-1
Upsampler
(M-1)K QAM N
g0,M-1[n]

indicates that new waveforms are necessary for 5G low- … … ΩK … Channel

Upsampler
MK-1 QAM gK-1,M-1[n]
latency communications. N

A. GFDM …
ΩKH
…

P/S Converter
Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) is a
Estimated
Data Bits
GFDM
… ΩKH …
Remove Slicer
recent physical (PHY) layer scheme designed for 5G Equalizer Receiver
CP

systems. The basic idea of GFDM is to transmit a block frame Channel Estimation …
ΩKH
…
and Synchronization
composed by M subsymbols with K subcarriers [3]. Each
Fig. 2. Block diagram of the WHT-GFDM system.
subcarrier is filtered by a subcarrier filter g k , m  n obtained by
circularly shifting a prototype pulse in time and frequency B. UFMC

domains given by as follows: Another potential candidate waveform for 5G is Universal

k Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC), which has gained high
g k , m [n]  g[(n  mK ) mod MK ]exp( j 2 n) (1)
K attraction in recent years. In UFMC, filtering is performed per
where m and k are the subsymbol and the subcarrier sub-band comprising multiple subcarriers, and is also known
indexes, respectively. This cyclic structure requires M as UF-OFDM. The filter lengths depend on the sub-band
subsymbols in the entire block that can be transmitted with a widths. Within a single sub-band, spectral properties for
single cyclic prefix (CP) and then be detected independently UFMC are alike filtered OFDM. It is able to make use of the
on the receiver side. In addition, the subsymbol duration of available spectrum with similar high efficiency as Filter Bank
GFDM is in the order of 10 μs. Those facts make GFDM Multicarrier (FBMC), where the filtering is done in each
become a competitive candidate for 5G low-latency subcarrier, while it does not suffer from high time domain
applications in PHY layer. overheads as FBMC does. As described in [5], UFMC is the
Furthermore, some related researches can further improve best choice for short packet and low latency transmission
the GFDM performance. For example, the combination of compared with OFDM and FBMC, because OFDM is rather
GFDM with the Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT) scheme inefficient due to the CP and wide frequency guard while
is proposed in [4] as shown in Fig. 2. The WHT is applied to FBMC is efficient only when transmitting long sequences.
each block of K data symbols, where the Walsh-Hadamard
matrix is given as follows: Ⅳ. Random Access based on Compressive Sensing
 K K 
 2 2  In current LTE networks, when a given user equipment
K   (2)
  K 
 K  (UE) has data in buffer to send in uplink, it has to first send
 2 2 

with 1  1 . In WHT-GFDM, for a given subsymbol, each scheduling request to eNodeB and needs to wait for grant

subcarrier transmits a linear combination of K data symbols from eNodeB. Since, for user activity wireless channel

to achieve frequency diversity. Hence, even if a subset of profiles are compressible within a very large receive space,

subcarriers is severely attenuated by the channel frequency sparse signal processing methodology is very suitable for

response, all data symbols might be received without errors. these sporadic traffic problems. A compressive sensing

This scheme can improve the robustness of GFDM against based random access procedure is proposed in [6] where

frequency-selective channels and decrease the bit error rate, control and data information are transmitted simultaneously

which is necessary for low-latency communications as it may with the same resource to reduce signaling overhead and

cut down the number of retransmission. access latency.

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Let control signaling p  C n be a preamble sequence send the user packets out to the Internet directly [7]. In this
which is unknown but from a given set P , i.e. p  P  C n way the backhaul traffic can be also reduced and avoid the
and traffic data x  C be an unknown (coded) vector. We set
n
traffic data congestion.
1 1
  and E x  1   .Hence, the control signaling
2 2
E p l2 l2
n n
Ⅵ. Conclusions
power is 𝛼 of the total transmit power, which is unity. The
goal at the receiver is to estimate the data vector x from the For the purpose of achieving the low-latency in 5G mobile

observations y whereby the vector h of channel coefficients is communications, many advanced techniques were proposed.

also unknown. The proposed strategy is to estimate the In this paper, we introduce the low-latency applications and

channel coefficients treating the data as noise, and the the candidate technologies for 5G. The new waveforms

second phase is to estimate the data by using the estimated discussed in this paper, such as GFDM and UFMC, are

channel in the first phase. suitable for low-latency transmissions. A new random access
technique based on compressive sensing is also able to
To achieve this process, the m  n matrix   PBWM  is
reduce the access delay at the basis of the efficient network
considered as the sampling matrix, where PB is a m  n
architecture to decrease the core network delay.
projection matrix with all elements are 1, W is the Fourier
matrix with elements Wkl  n1/ 2ei 2 kl / n , k , l  0,..., n  1 and
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
M  is a random diagonal matrix. So, the transmission signal
This research was supported by Basic Science Research
can be expressed as y    p  x   PBWM ( p  x) , and the
Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea
received signal can be expressed as (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education
yr  PBWM circ(h)( p  x)  e , where circ  h  denotes the (2015R1D1A1A01057190).
circulant matrix with h on its first column, and e is the additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN). After correlating with the
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