Reducing interference via link adaptation in delay-critical wireless networks

One of the current (6G) wireless networks research’s trends is to investigate short distance and dense scenarios, where users are locally connected in sub-networks. Such use case is critical to support the advances of industrial internet of things or Industry 4.0 (I4.0), e.g. connecting an entire group of sensors and actuators of a robot. Therefore, schemes that can properly manage the interference must be deployed in practical systems to allow the promised performance advances of 6G. Targeting these high density scenarios, we describe the Power Optimization for Low Interference and Throughput Enhancement (POLITE) paradigm for link adaptation and power allocation, which leverages available radio resources to stabilize and reduce the interference. The baseline link adaptation schemes are compared with POLITE in their performance in a 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) calibrated system level simulator for industrial scenarios. As services in industrial environments require high reliability under constrained delays, we propose different delay-aware formulations in the POLITE design. In this work, we provide solutions both for relaxed delay requirements and for latency critical traffic, whose delay must be minimized. In particular, in the latter case, we propose also modifications of user selection and resource allocation procedures to further improve the reliability and latency. Simulation results prove the benefits of POLITE in terms of increased throughput, fulfillment of relaxed and delay-critical requirements, with an overall reduced transmit power compared to the current baseline link adaptation schemes.