Analysis of Data Interruption in an LTE Highway Scenario with Dual Connectivity

This study evaluates whether last versions of Long Term Evolution with dual connectivity are able to support the latency and reliability requirements for the upcoming vehicular use-cases and time-critical applications. Data interruption times during handovers and cell management operations are evaluated by means of system level simulations for a high-speed scenario. The scenario models a highway covered by a macro layer and an ultra dense network of small cells distributed on both sides of the road. Results reveal that for single connectivity, and due to the large amount of handovers, terminals are unable to exchange data with the network about 5% of the time. This time is considerably reduced if dual connectivity with split bearer architecture is adopted, with less than 1%of time in data interruption. However, when adopting secondary cell group architecture, the relative data interruption time increases up to 6.9%.