Multi-Channel Access Solutions for 5G New Radio

TL;DR

This paper explores multi-channel access solutions for 5G New Radio, aiming to improve throughput, reliability, and flexibility through innovative multi-service radio resource management techniques.

Contribution

It introduces novel multi-channel access solutions, including component carrier selection and multi-connectivity strategies, demonstrating significant performance improvements over existing schemes.

Findings

Median throughput gain of up to 100% with proposed carrier selection.

Significant performance gains over state-of-the-art schemes.

Enhanced load balancing and latency reduction in 5G scenarios.

Abstract

5G New Radio paves the way for introducing novel multi-service radio resource management solutions tailored for enhanced Mobile Broadband and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication service classes. Multi-Channel Access is a family of such multi-service 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, reliability improvement by increasing the diversity order and/or coordinated transmission/reception, as well as flexibility and load balancing improvement by decoupling the downlink and the uplink access points. 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.