Dynamic Connectivity for Robust Applications in Rayleigh-Fading Channels

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks envisions ultra-reliability in wireless communications. One common approach to guarantee that is diversity, e.g., by sending data redundantly over several channels to prevent the interruption of the combined signal. However, many applications, which we refer to as robust, are able to tolerate short communication outages. Thus, we propose a dynamic connectivity scheme named "reaction diversity," which only switches the channel in case of bad conditions, instead of providing multiple channels throughout the transmission. As a result, time-correlated failures, e.g., caused by fading, are shortened. Through simulations with Rayleigh fading channels, we show that if short outages are acceptable, the application outage probability can be reduced by several orders of magnitude over selection combining of two channels, while only consuming half the resources.