On the Resource Utilization of Multi-Connectivity Transmission for URLLC Services in 5G New Radio

Multi-connectivity with packet duplication, where the same data packet is duplicated and transmitted from multiple transmitters, is proposed in 5G New Radio as a reliability enhancement feature. This paper presents an analytical study of the outage probability enhancement with multi-connectivity, and analyses its cost in terms of resource usage. The performance analysis is further compared against conventional single-connectivity transmission. Our analysis shows that, for transmission with a given block error rate target, multi-connectivity results in more than an order of magnitude outage probability improvement over the baseline single-connectivity scheme. However, such gains are achieved at the cost of almost doubling the amount of radio resources used. Multi-connectivity should thus be selectively used such that its benefits can be harnessed for critical users, while the price to pay in terms of resource utilization is simultaneously minimized.