A Study on Adaptive User Equipment Aggregation Mechanism for Future Internet of Things Network

With the progress of Internet of Things (IoT) services, especially the industrial IoT (IIoT) service, and personal consumption by wearable devices, the requirement from the perspective of capability, reliability and latency for consumer scenarios (e.g., AR/VR) and industry scenarios becomes more and more stringent. Due to limited uplink (UL) transmission power, especially for the new radio reduced capability (NR-RedCap) devices and wearable devices, UL transmission would be a bottleneck. In this paper, in order to increase the coverage and decrease the latency at the same time, a new transmission mechanism based on an adaptive user equipment (UE) aggregation, i.e., a multi-path transmission, is discussed, wherein multiple devices are aggregated to increase UL power and explore the diversity gain. According to the quality of radio link between UEs and base station (BS), data transmission can be a single path based on an indirect link or direct link, or over multiple paths from multiple transmission nodes. The procedure to support such UE aggregation based transmission is also designed. The performance gain is provided and discussed in detail to verify the benefit of the proposed mechanism. This paper helps to identify main difference under different cooperation schemes and provide an insight into UE aggregation based transmission.