Performance evaluation of 5G mmWave communications with multi-connectivity.

Abstract

Diversified emerging applications with tremendous user growth in cellular communication are continuously increasing the network load. The fifth-generation (5G) wireless systems are developing to meet this challenging demand with the high-rate millimetre-wave (mmWave) communications as an important part. At the same time, mmWave suffers from frequent blockage events, consequently leading to outage and distortion for cell-edge users. Recently, the third-generation partnership project (3GPP) proposed ‘Multi-Connectivity’ mechanism to address this challenge. Multi-connectivity allows the user equipment to connect multiple access points simultaneously, so that the user equipment is capable of switching access points in case of the active link faces outage or below threshold level distortion. The number of such simultaneously connected access points with user equipment called Degree of Multi-Connectivity and still an open question for research. The multi-connectivity technique helps to recover the outage events, network performance but also introduces additional signaling overhead and networking protocol complexity. Higher Degree of Multi-Connectivity provides improved network performance but leads to networking protocol complexity and signaling overhead. On the other hand, lower Degree of Multi-Connectivity yield less improved network performance with less networking protocol complexity and signaling overhead. Hence, the main focus of this work is to find the Degree of Multi-Connectivity for a typical 5G urban deployment scenario. To offer a concrete answer to the question – a python-based simulator with 3GPP multi-connectivity technique is developed, where signal-to-noise ratio, outage probability, spectral efficiency, and capacity are selected as the interest of metrics and characterized for different degree of multi-connectivity, considering both dynamic (human) and static (buildings) blockage conditions in signal propagation path. Results obtained from the simulated outputs show that the Degree of Multi-Connectivity up to four secures higher relative gains. The implemented simulator is capable to simulate any scenario for further analysis of the mmWave multi-connectivity technique for different deployment configurations.