Quantifying the Gain of Multi-Connectivity in Wireless LAN
Nick Schwarzenberg, Albrecht Wolf, Norman Franchi, Gerhard Paul Fettweis · 2018
Multi-Connectivity (MC) using multi-link diversity is a promising approach to enable Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications. While recent analytical results about MC already indicate improved reliability compared to a single link, we are interested in the actual gain of implementing MC into an established wireless standard. Therefore, we evaluate inter-frequency MC over independent fading channels for the physical layer of Wireless LAN (WLAN). We compare three combining schemes, namely Selection Combining (SC), Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC), and the recently emerging Joint Decoding (JD), by their respective packet error rates in Monte-Carlo simulations. Our results show that MC outperforms a single link for all of the three combining schemes, even if the total transmit power is not increased but shared among the available links. JD performs best and is found to be considerably less dependent on SNR estimation than MRC and SC. We show that packet synchronization in WLAN causes an error floor in frequency-selective channels which can be effectively mitigated by MC.