One can consider the benefits and disadvantages of changing the PHR cut-off time, so that a second earlier PUSCH (than a first PUSCH transmission occasion) that is scheduled later (than the scheduling instance for the first PUSCH transmission occasion) carries the PHR instead of a first later PUSCH that is scheduled later on the same serving cell/uplink carrier. One potential benefit is that the PHR is conveyed to the network earlier. The other potential benefit is to report the PHR for the “out-of-order” PUSCH, which may be arguably more important and may have higher priority (e.g., the URLLC), instead of reporting the PHR for the “in-order” PUSCH which may be arguably less important and may have lower priority (e.g., the eMBB) that would be reported based on the current/existing PHR cut-off time in Rel-15. One further potential benefit of defining PHR cut-off time based on the earliest PUSCH instead of earliest DCI scheduling of a possibly later PUSCH can be in case of using enhanced UL power control to address inter-UE multiplexing issue. In such a case, if a URLLC UE can report PHR as fast as possible, especially if the PHR shows there is little, zero or negative power headroom left, the gNB can use a different set of resources (e.g., non-overlapping with eMBB) to schedule the URLLC transmission, and use the enhanced power control schemes for the UEs with larger available power headroom.
A further use-case for re-defining the PHR cut-off time is to address the issue of uplink pre-emption that might be supported in 5G NR Rel-16 in the context of