Outage prediction for ultra-reliable low-latency communications in fast fading channels

The addition of redundancy is a promising solution to achieve a certain quality of service (QoS) for ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) in challenging fast fading scenarios. However, adding more and more redundancy to the transmission results in severely increased radio resource consumption. Monitoring and prediction of fast fading channels can serve as the foundation of advanced scheduling. By choosing suitable resources for transmission, the resource consumption is reduced while maintaining the QoS. In this article, we present outage prediction approaches for Rayleigh and Rician fading channels. Appropriate performance metrics are introduced to show the suitability for URLLC radio resource scheduling. Outage prediction in the Rayleigh fading case can be achieved by adding a threshold comparison to state-of-the-art fading prediction approaches. A line-of-sight (LOS) component estimator is introduced that enables outage prediction in LOS scenarios. Extensive simulations have shown that under realistic conditions, effective outage probabilities of 10 - 5 can be achieved while reaching up-state prediction probabilities of more than 90 % . We show that the predictor can be tuned to satisfy the desired trade-off between prediction reliability and utilizability of the link. This enables our predictor to be used in future scheduling strategies, which achieve the challenging QoS of URLLC with fewer required redundancy.