Delay Violation Probability Modeling for 5G Systems with HARQ Operation

Sangwon Seo, Vishnu N Moothedath, Niloofar Mehrnia, Neda Petreska, Bernhard Kloiber, James Gross

Meeting the growing demand for quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees in 5G networks requires an accurate characterization of delay performance, commonly captured by the delay violation probability (DVP) at a specified delay target. Although hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) is a fundamental reliability mechanism in wireless systems and is central to supporting QoS, many existing approaches to DVP prediction for HARQ remain overly simplified. In particular, they omit important delay components and adopt assumptions that do not reflect the operation of HARQ in slot-based systems such as 5G. Consequently, these models can substantially underestimate the DVP, especially under stringent latency requirements, where the contribution of the neglected components becomes critical. To address this gap, we develop a tractable DVP characterization for 5G HARQ that accounts for queueing, transmission, decoding, and feedback delay, as well as the contribution of Control Signaling (CS) transmissions to the overall delay, under practical timing assumptions consistent with 3GPP operation. Moreover, we incorporate parallel packet transmissions that proceed without waiting for earlier packets to succeed, an essential HARQ behavior frequently overlooked in prior work. Using tools from queueing theory and Markov analysis, we then derive upper bounds on the DVP and validate them against ns-3 5G-LENA simulations.