Achieving High Availability in Wireless Networks by an Optimal Number of Rayleigh-Fading Links

Future cellular networks have to meet enormous, unprecedented, and multifaceted requirements, such as high availability and low latency, in order to provide service to new applications in, e.g., vehicular communication, smart grids, and industrial automation. Such applications often demand a temporal availability of six nines or higher. In this work, we investigate how high availability can be achieved in wireless networks. To elaborate, we focus on the joint availability of power-controlled Rayleigh-fading links while using selection combining. By applying a basic availability model for uncorrelated links, we determine whether it is more efficient in terms of power to utilize multiple links in parallel rather than boosting the power of a stand-alone link. The results reveal that, for high availability, it can actually be beneficial to use multiple links in parallel. For instance, an availability of 1 - 10(-12) is achieved with 100 dB less power when power is shared among multiple links. Depending upon the availability desired, an optimal number of parallel links in terms of power consumption exists. Additionally, we extend the availability model to correlated links and investigate the performance degradation due to correlation.