Selective Redundant MP-QUIC for 5G Mission Critical Wireless Applications

In this paper, a new multi-connectivity protocol is introduced for mission critical applications that use wireless 5G multi-UE devices. It extends the MP-QUIC transport protocol by adding selective data duplication with strict prioritization to support a mix of critical and non-critical applications on a single end-to-end connection; e.g. suitable for self-driving cars getting mission critical drive control commands from the network (priority) while receiving map- updates (background). The Selective Redundant MP- QUIC solution simultaneously provides bandwidth aggregation and higher speeds for background data while ensuring maximum reliability and availability for the priority data by duplicating it on the available paths. The proposed algorithm is first evaluated using an emulated fixed-delay channel as well as a well-known Internet connection model. Next, a highway drive test is conducted using two LTE modems, resembling a typical autonomous car scenario. The tests show that the algorithm can protect the critical data flow also in presence of a background load of 2 Mb/s and across a wide range of channel conditions. Using our proposed MP-QUIC solution over two LTE connections, the 99.9%-tile of critical traffic latency shows a 5 times improvement versus using a single-path connection and 3 times versus using state of the art MP-QUIC protocols.