Multi-Channel Access Solutions for 5G New Radio

Multi-channel access is a family of multi-service radio resource management solutions that enable a user equipment to aggregate radio resources from multiple sources. The objective is multi-fold: throughput enhancement through access to a larger bandwidth tailored for enhanced mobile broadband, reliability improvement by increasing the diversity order and/or coordinated transmission/reception tailored for ultra-reliable low latency communication service classes, as well as flexibility and load balancing improvement by decoupling the downlink and the uplink access points, for both service classes. This paper presents several multi-channel access solutions for 5G New Radio multi-service scenarios. In particular, throughput enhancement and latency reduction concepts like multi-connectivity, carrier aggregation, downlink-uplink decoupled access and coordinated multi-point connectivity are discussed. Moreover, novel design solutions exploiting these concepts are proposed. Numerical evaluation of the introduced solutions indicates significant performance gains over state-of-the-art schemes; for example, our proposed component carrier selection mechanism leads to a median throughput gain of up to 100% by means of an implicit load balance. Therefore, the proposed multi-channel access solutions have the potential to be key multi-service enablers for 5G New Radio.