A Novel Adaptive UE Aggregation-Based Transmission Scheme Design for a Hybrid Network with Multi-Connectivity

Abstract

With the progress of the eras and the development of science and technology, the requirements of device-to-device (D2D) connectivity increased rapidly. As one important service in future systems, ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) has attracted attention in many applications, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, and other scenarios due to its characteristics of ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability. However, in order to achieve the requirement of ultra-low latency, energy consumption often increases significantly. The optimization of energy consumption and the latency of the system in the communication field are often in conflict with each other. In this paper, in order to optimize the energy consumption and the latency jointly under different scenarios, and since the detailed requirements for latency and reliability are diverse in different services, we propose an adaptive UE aggregation (AUA)-based transmission scheme that explores the diversity gain of multiple simultaneous paths to reduce the overall latency of data transmission, wherein multiple paths correspond to multiple coordination nodes. Furthermore, it could provide the feasibility of link adaptation by adjusting the path number according to the real transmission environment. Then, unnecessary energy waste could be avoided. To evaluate the performance, the energy-delay product (EDP) is proposed for the latency and energy comparison. The provided simulation results align with the numerical data. Through the analysis, it can be proven that the proposed scheme can achieve a joint optimization of latency and energy consumption to meet different types of URLLC services.