Evaluation of NR-Sidelink for Cooperative Industrial AGVs

Industry 4.0 has brought to attention the need for a connected, flexible, and autonomous production environment. The New Radio (NR)-sidelink, which was introduced by the third-generation partnership project (3GPP) in Release 16, can be particularly helpful for factories that need to facilitate cooperative and close-range communication. Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are essential for material handling and carriage within these environments, and using NR-sidelink communication can further enhance their performance. An efficient resource allocation mechanism is required to ensure reliable communication and avoid interference between AGVs and other wireless systems in the factory using NR-sidelink. This work presents a simulation analysis of the 3GPP standardized resource allocation algorithm for NR-sidelink in an industrial scenario with a use case of cooperative-carrying AGVs. We suggest further improvements that are tailored to the quality of service (QoS) requirements of an indoor factory communication scenario with cooperative AGVs. The use of NR-sidelink communication has the potential to help meet the QoS requirements for different Industry 4.0 use cases. This work can be a foundation for further improvements in NR-sidelink in 3GPP Release 18 and beyond.