Adaptive Multi-Connectivity Scheduling for Reliable Low-Latency Communication in 802.11be

The demand for wireless communication systems that provide low latency with high reliability is growing due to emerging applications such as wireless industrial control or mobile robotics. A promising approach to improve latency and reliability performance of wireless communications is Multi-Connectivity (MC), i.e., using multiple communication paths at the same time. The task group working on the upcoming 802.11be amendment is discussing multi-link operation as one of the main features. In previous work different static MC scheduling schemes have been evaluated and in different scenarios different schemes demonstrated to provide the best latency and reliability performance. Based on these findings and in coherence with the discussion about multi-link operation in the 802.11be task group an adaptive MC scheduling scheme is proposed in this work. Two variants are proposed and both perform a client-based decision. The first variant decides solely based on the parameters available at every station itself. The second variant also takes into account additional information about the network that are gathered and shared with the stations by the AP. System level simulations with ns-3 for an industrial scenario show that the adaptive MC schemes can significantly improve the latency and reliability performance, especially in scenarios with medium network load. The insights gained in this work can be used to develop multi-link operation concepts in order to improve latency and reliability performance in the upcoming 802.11be amendment.