As used herein, the terms “first”, “second” and so forth refer to different elements. The singular forms “a” and “an” are intended to include the plural forms as well, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise. The terms “comprises”, “comprising”, “has”, “having”, “includes” and/or “including” as used herein, specify the presence of stated features, elements, and/or components and the like, but do not preclude the presence or addition of one or more other features, elements, components and/or combinations thereof. The term “based on” is to be read as “based at least in part on”. The term “one embodiment” and “an embodiment” are to be read as “at least one embodiment”. The term “another embodiment” is to be read as “at least one other embodiment”. Other definitions, explicit and implicit, may be included below.

Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various telecommunication services such as voice, video, data, messaging and broadcasts. Currently a 5G/NR network is developed for maximum flexibility to support multiple and substantially different use cases. Besides the typical mobile broadband use case, the 5G/NR network can also support machine type communication (MTC), ultra-low latency critical communications (URLCC), side-link device-to-device (D2D) and several other use cases.

In a NR network, the basic scheduling unit is called a slot. A slot consists of 14 orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols for the normal cyclic prefix configuration. The NR network can support many different subcarrier spacing (SCS) configurations, and at an SCS of 30 kHz the OFDM symbol duration is about 33 μs. As an example, a slot with 14 OFDM symbols for the same SCS is 500 μs long (including cyclic prefixes).