Reliability Oriented Dual Connectivity for URLLC services in 5G New Radio

Novel solutions are required to meet the stringent reliability and latency requirements targeted for the Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication service class, which emerged with the introduction of 5G new radio. This paper analyses reliability-oriented multi-Connectivity - where the same data packet is independently transmitted through multiple links - as such a solution. Multi-connectivity is first presented at a conceptual level. We then propose a novel admission mechanism to control the number of users operating in multi-connectivity mode. Finally, the reliability and latency enhancement with multi-connectivity in heterogeneous network scenario with multi-service traffic is evaluated via system level simulation. Up to 23% latency reduction and 57% reliability improvements over the single connectivity solution are observed. However such gains are sensitive to the configuration criteria, and the average gains are more modest.