How Reliable and Capable is Multi-Connectivity?

Abstract

Multi-connectivity (MCo) is considered to be a key strategy for enabling reliable transmissions and enhanced data rates in fifth-generation mobile networks, as it provides multiple links from source to destination. In this work, we quantify the communication performance of MCo in terms of outage probability and throughput. For doing so, we establish a simple, yet accurate analytical framework at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), in which the number of links, the spectral efficiency, the path loss, and the SNR are incorporated, giving new insights into the potentials of MCo as compared with single-connectivity (SCo). These are our main contributions: (1) finding the exact coding gain of the outage probability for parallel block-fading channels;(2) quantifying the performance improvement of MCo over SCo in terms of SNR gain; and (3) comparing optimal and suboptimal combining algorithms for MCo at the receiver side, namely joint decoding, selection combining, and maximal-ratio combining, also in terms of SNR gain. Additionally, we apply our analytical framework to real field channel measurements and thereby illustrate the potential of MCo to achieve high reliability and high data rates in real cellular networks.

Wireless Edge Computing With Latency and Reliability Guarantees

“…the reliability, of wireless links. For that purpose, MC exploits different forms of diversity to cut down on the number of failed handovers, dropped connections and, generally speaking, radio-link failures (RLFs) that might cause service interruptions [54], [55].…”

Reliability and Error Burst Length Analysis of Wireless Multi-Connectivity

“…Multi-connectivity has been studied from different perspectives to enable URLLC in 5G. For instance, Wolf et al [1] studied a scenario with one user equipment (UE) connected to multiple base stations (BS) and with multiple simultaneous connections to the same BS. The benefits of this approach are assessed in terms of transmit power reduction, achieved by increasing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).…”

“…Today a typical smartphone incorporates numerous wireless interfaces that can be used to establish an equal number of communication paths; this is commonly known as multiconnectivity [1]. Interface diversity [2] is a specific way of utilizing the multi-connectivity in order to increase the reliability of the transmission by adding redundancy.…”

Impact of Correlated Failures in 5G Dual Connectivity Architectures for URLLC Applications

“…One important challenge to tackle is on how to decrease error probability by several orders of magnitude. Multi (dual) connectivity is one of the promising tools to improve the reliability and capacity of mobile radio networks [4]. It allows users to connect to different types of base stations (BSs) or distinct carriers such that multiple copies of the same information can be delivered using different radio access technologies [5].…”

“…In URLLC context, the recent literature has studied the performance of multi-connectivity with packet duplication either to enhance reliability or to improve other network parameters such as required transmit power, link utilization and network power consumption for a specific reliability requirement (e.g., [4], [6]). The idea is to transmit multiple instances of a packet over multiple links.…”