Wireless Multi-Node uRLLc B5G/6G Networks for Critical Services in Electrical Power Systems

The successful operations of power system require the support of communication networks with massive nodes access and two-way reliable and latency-critical transmission, which is the most-important use case of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLc) in the Fifth-Generation and Beyond and Sixth-Generation (B5G/6G) networks. In this paper, based on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal in 5G, a new OFDM employing the hopped subcarrier technique (OFDM/FH) is proposed to attain the multiple nodes connectivity and the enhancement of transmission reliability. Considering the short and bursty packet types in the control information of power systems, the OFDM/FH signal can be naturally integrated with the mini-slot frame structure and automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheduling scheme to reduce the latency. The trade-off between the reliability in terms of the bit-error rate (BER) and the retransmission latency is investigated by semi-analytic simulations. Through the new joint design of the signal waveform and frame structure for uRLLc, we find that the proposed system can attain up to 99.999% reliability and ms-level latency for electric power services, even in the harsh wireless environment.