Fog-RAN Enabled Multi-Connectivity and Multi-Cell Scheduling Framework for Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication

Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) is a newly introduced service class targeting emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) application scenarios. This paper assumes an interference-limited Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) setup composed of multiple Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) equipped with multiple antennas serving single-antenna users. F-RAN facilitates collaborative solutions while reducing delay by pushing the network capabilities beyond the edge. By leveraging diversity, RRHs may cooperate through silencing, reducing interference, or joint transmission strategies such as maximal ratio transmission. We derive closed-form outage probability expressions and attain their diversity gain. We validate the derived analytical results through extensive numerical simulations. Furthermore, we propose a mini-slots-based scheduling framework to serve URLLC users within their fixed latency budget. In an interference-limited regime with the proposed scheduling framework, we show that a performance gain is superior when RRHs cooperate compared to when they do not. We briefly discuss the cost of reliability, i.e., the impact on the system’s average sum throughput under cooperation. Moreover, numerical results verify that cooperating transmission schemes boost transmission reliability with a significantly improved latency performance at the cost of reduced system’s average sum throughput.