Performance Characterization and Traffic Protection in Street Multi-Band Millimeter-Wave and Microwave Deployments

To alleviate the impact of outages caused by dynamic blockage of propagation paths in millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, 3GPP has proposed multi-connectivity operation, where user equipment (UE) maintains simultaneous links to both sub-6 GHz and mmWave BSs. We address one of the most challenging prospective deployments – multi-lane street deployment with intra-and inter-RAT multi-connectivity. By utilizing the mixture of analytical and simulation tools, we first characterize the outage characteristics at mmWave layer. These characteristics further serve as an input to the queuing model characterizing service performance of sub-6 GHz BS serving sub-6 GHz and temporarily offloaded mmWave sessions and implementing traffic protection strategies. Our numerical results show that the use of inter-RAT multi-connectivity to offload mmWave sessions decreases sub-6 GHz session rate multiple times while utilizing multi-connectivity at the mmWave layer allows to partially compensate it. Traffic “jam” road conditions affect the sub-6 GHz session rate reducing it by approximately 20% compared to “normal” road traffic conditions. Furthermore, reserving shares of resources to sub-6 GHz and mmWave traffic favors “heavy-weight” mmWave sessions. On the other hand, individual session resource allocation leads to fair performance. However, this option induces the trade-off between the attained rate and the session drop probability. IEEE