Ultra-reliable low-latency communications support using grant free transmissions

Abstract

A user equipment (UE) selects first and second radio resources from respective first and second pools of radio resources. In one example these are primarily allocated for contention-free and scheduling-based channel access, respectively. Content to duplicate in parallel communications is selected based at least on a characteristic of uplink data waiting to be sent (such as size) and/or on the selected first and second radio resources (such as timing difference between them). The UE transmits the selected content on each of the selected first and second radio resources. In the examples the content to duplicate was selected from among the uplink data to send and a scheduling request message. In various embodiments one of these transmissions indicates it's a duplicate, and the duplicated scheduling request message is transmitted on the first resource with the uplink data. These teachings are particularly useful for URLLC data.