Abstract
The fifth-generation (5G) new radio (NR) cellular system promises a significant increase in capacity with reduced latency. However, the 5G NR system will be deployed along with legacy cellular systems such as the long-term evolution (LTE). Scarcity of spectrum resources in low frequency bands motivates adjacent-/co-carrier deployments. This approach comes with a wide range of practical benefits and it improves spectrum utilization by re-using the LTE bands. However, such deployments restrict the 5G NR flexibility in terms of frame allocations to avoid the most critical mutual adjacent-channel interference. This in turns prevents achieving the promised 5G NR latency figures. In this we paper, we tackle this issue by proposing to use the minislot uplink feature of 5G NR to perform uplink acknowledgement and feedback to reduce the frame latency with selective blind retransmission to overcome the effect of interference. Extensive system-level simulations under realistic scenarios show that the proposed solution can reduce the peak frame latency for feedback and acknowledgment up to 33% and for retransmission by up to 25% at a marginal cost of an up to 3% reduction in throughput.