Efficient and Reliable Wireless Communications Through Multi-Connectivity and Rateless Coding

Achieving extremely high reliability is one of the key targets in the development of fifth generation mobile networks. To meet this ambitious aim, usually redundancy is introduced by simultaneously utilizing multiple links that are separated in frequency and/or space. However, current standards simply duplicate packets on these links, resulting in an inefficient high usage of resources that could have been used for other applications. To address this problem, rateless coding using multiple links is proposed for ultra-reliable communications, mathematically modeled, and evaluated in this paper. The benefits comprise efficient resource usage and a simplified feedback mechanism. Finally, they can be implemented in a technology-agnostic manner on application layer to easily exploit interface diversity.