xURLCC in 6g with meshed RAN

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of mesh connectivity among RAN nodes in 6G to achieve sub-millisecond latency for extreme URLLC, enhancing network reliability and flexibility beyond 5G capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces architectural options for mesh RAN topology and discusses three methods for establishing mesh connectivity, emphasizing their advantages and disadvantages.

Findings

Mesh RAN can reduce latency and improve reliability for 6G URLLC.

Direct peer-to-peer communication among base stations is feasible.

Different mesh connectivity options have distinct trade-offs.

Abstract

5G Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications Technology (URLLC) will not be able to provide extremely reliable low latency services to the complex networks in 6G. Moreover, URLLC that began with 5G has to be refined and improved in 6G to provide xURLCC (extreme URLCC) with sub-millisecond latency, for supporting diverse mission-critical applications. This paper aims to highlight the importance of peer-to-peer mesh connectivity for services that require xURLLC. Deploying mesh connectivity among RAN nodes would add significant value to the current 5G New Radio (5G NR) enabling 6G to increase flexibility and reliability of the networks while reducing the inherent latency introduced by the core network. To provide a mesh connectivity in RAN, the nodes should be able to communicate with each other directly and be independent from the mobile core network so that data can be directly exchanged between base stations (gNBs) whereas certain aspects of signalling procedure including data session establishment will be managed by RAN itself. In this paper, we introduce several architectural choices for a mesh network topology that could potentially be crucial to a number of applications. In addition, three possible options to create mesh connectivity in RAN are provided, and their pros and cons are discussed in detail.