Multi-Connectivity in Mobile Networks: Challenges and Benefits

TL;DR

This paper explores multi-connectivity in 5G mobile networks, analyzing its architectures, benefits, challenges, and the impact of design choices on network performance through experimental evaluation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multi-connectivity architectures, benefits, challenges, and open issues, supported by experimental results highlighting design impacts.

Findings

Multi-connectivity improves user throughput and reliability.

Design choices significantly affect network performance.

Open issues include resource management and protocol optimization.

Abstract

Satisfying the stringent 5G Quality of Service (QoS) requirements necessitates efficient resource utilization by the mobile networks. Consequently, we argue that Multi-Connectivity (MC) is an effective solution to leverage the limited radio resources from multiple base stations (BSs) in order to enhance the user throughput, provide seamless connectivity, or increase the data reliability. For this, we study different MC architectures, where distinct network entities and protocol layers are used to split or aggregate the user traffic. The benefits and challenges of MC are analyzed as well as the open issues that network/device vendors and mobile network operators (MNOs) have to address for its use. Finally, through experimental evaluations, we illustrate the importance of MC design decisions for the overall network performance.