New Radio Sidelink with Beam Selection for Reliable Communication in High-Density Dynamic Swarms

Swarm production robots, an enabler for Industry 4.0, are expected to establish direct communication links with each other based on proximity. The 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)'s New Radio sidelink is a candidate technology to enable such communication links. However, when operating in autonomous resource selection mode (mode 2), sidelink communications are prone to half-duplex and interference problems, the severity of which increases with the swarm's density. In this paper, we study how beam selection using directional antennas and context information can help reduce the impact of these problems and thus improve the reliability of packet reception. We evaluate the effect of directional antennas when applied at the transmitter and receiver, both separately and simultaneously, for increasing swarm density. Our evaluations show that these enhancements let mode 2 achieve 120% more user equipments (UE) in the swarm for a 99.99% reliability target, compared to the case where these enhancements are not applied.