Optimized Interface Diversity for Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC)

An important ingredient of the future 5G systems will be Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC). A way to offer URLLC without intervention in the baseband/PHY layer design is to use interface diversity and integrate multiple communication interfaces, each interface based on a different technology. Our approach is to use rateless codes to seamlessly distribute coded payload and redundancy data across multiple available communication interfaces. We formulate an optimization problem to find the payload allocation weights that maximize the reliability at specific target latency values. By considering different scenarios, we find that optimized strategies can significantly outperform k-out-of-n strategies, where the latter do not account for the characteristics of the different interfaces. Our approach is supported by experimental results.