Composite Robot Aided Coexistence of eMBB, URLLC and mMTC in Smart Factory

In this paper, a composite robot aided system is proposed to support the coexistence of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra reliable low latency (URLLC) and massive machine type communication (mMTC) traffic in smart factory. The composite robot is deployed to inspect the factory by upstreaming high quality images/videos via eMBB, while collecting information from the mMTC devices and allowing URLLC traffic to overlap upon the scheduled robot transmission. This ensures high energy efficiency of the mMTC traffic and low latency of the URLLC traffic. As the heterogeneous traffic affects each other in a complex manner with shared resources, the objective of this paper is to maximize the minimum average rate of the inspection robot while completing the information collection tasks of all mMTC devices and responding to URLLC requests. In light of dynamic growth of information in mMTC devices and strict delay limits for URLLC traffic, we propose an alternative optimization algorithm of joint optimization of task scheduling, bandwidth allocation and robot trajectory (TSBART). The proposed TSBART algorithm achieves a higher minimum average rate as well as higher quality of service (QoS) than the previous work based on greedy and average resource allocation algorithms, thanks to its higher degree of freedom in optimization.