Betreuer/in: Baron
Fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR), standardized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), defines mini-slot transmission as a key mechanism to support Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC).
A mini-slot spans only a subset of OFDM symbols within a slot, typically 2, 4, or 7 symbols, allowing transmissions to begin at any symbol boundary rather than waiting for a full slot. Despite this being a core 5G NR feature, widely used simulation frameworks such as Simu5G, built on top of the OMNeT++ simulator, do not natively support symbol-level scheduling, making it difficult to evaluate mini-slot latency behaviour accurately. This thesis designs, implements, and validates a mini-slot scheduling extension for Simu5G. Five gaps in the existing framework are identified and addressed, covering the air-frame duration, the Medium Access Control (MAC) scheduling interval, the HARQ evaluation timer, the transport block size calculation, and the absence of a symbol-level occupancy grid. Two schedulers are built on top of these: a URLLC Priority Scheduler that gives time-critical flows strict priority, and a Configured Grant Scheduler that issues periodic pre-authorised grants to remove the scheduling-request overhead for URLLC traffic. Simulation results confirm that the measured MAC layer delay matches the theoretical prediction exactly for all tested configurations. Smaller mini-slots deliver significantly lower end-to-end latency, demonstrating that the extension correctly captures the latency-versus-capacity tradeoff of mini-slot operation. The URLLC Priority Scheduler consistently delivers lower delay to time-critical flows without starving best-effort traffic. The Configured Grant Scheduler achieves the same downlink results as the priority scheduler. In the uplink, both schedulers produce identical delay, since the UE in Simu5G always
sends a Buffer Status Report (BSR) to request an uplink grant before transmitting, even when a configured grant is already active. Achieving the full 3GPP-specified uplink benefit requires extending the UE MAC to skip this step when a configured grant is present.
Room 04.137, Martensstr. 3, Erlangen
or:
Zoom-Meeting:
https://fau.zoom-x.de/j/68350702053?pwd=UkF3aXY0QUdjeSsyR0tyRWtLQ0hYUT09
Meeting-ID: 683 5070 2053
Kenncode: 647333