Analysis of NOMA-Based Retransmission Schemes for Factory Automation Applications

New use cases and applications in factory automation scenarios impose demanding requirements for traditional industrial communications. In particular, latency and reliability are considered as some of the most representative Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that limit the technological choices addressing wireless communications. Indeed, there is a considerable research effort ongoing in the area of wireless systems, not only from academia, but also from companies, towards novel solutions that fit Industry 4.0 KPIs. A major limitation for traditional wireless architectures is related to the harsh nature of the industrial propagation channel. Accordingly, this paper addresses these challenges by studying the reliability and latency performance of the joint use of different retransmission schemes in combination with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) techniques. Two general retransmission schemes have been tested: time-based and spatial diversity-based retransmissions. An adaptive injection level NOMA solution has been combined with the retransmission schemes to improve the reliability of critical information. In all cases, a particular set of simulations has been carried out varying the main parameters, such as modulation, code rate and the injection level. Moreover, the impact of the number of transmitters in relation to the communication reliability has been analyzed. Results show that spatial diversity-based retransmissions overcome considerably the reliability obtained with time-domain retransmissions while maintaining assumable latency rates.