Dynamic Multi-Connectivity Activation for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication

Abstract: Multi-connectivity (MC) with packet duplication, where the same data packet is duplicated and transmitted from multiple transmitters, is proposed in 5G New Radio as a reliability enhancement feature. However, it is found to be resource inefficient, since radio resources from more than one transmitters are required to serve a single user. Improving the performance enhancement vs. resource utilization tradeoff with MC is therefore a key design challenge. This work proposes a heuristic resource efficient latency-aware dynamic MC algorithm which activates MC selectively such that its benefits are harnessed for critical users, while minimizing the corresponding resource usage. Numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithm can deliver the outage performance gains of legacy MC schemes while requiring up to 45% less resources.