Wireless Multi-Connectivity Management with Packet-level Delay Gradient Analysis

Wireless multi-connectivity solutions are essential for reliable low-latency wireless communication services enabling delay-sensitive applications such as industrial robotics. However, non-expert industry vertical players in networking seek low-installation-cost and high-quality solutions to use wireless multi-connectivity. This paper proposes a wireless multi-connectivity management gateway (WMC-GW) to effectively utilize multiple wireless networks without modifying applications and wireless network systems. We install a WMC-GW at each mobile robot and another WMC-GW at the application server. There are two features. The first is real-time radio access technology (RAT) selection, where the WMC-GW select an appropriate RAT based on predicted delay trends using IP packet-level delay gradients to follow sensitive delay variations. The second is the flexibility of flow-level policy control, where we develop multiple RAT selection policies based on the delay gradients. Through performance evaluation, our approach effectively works in low-latency RAT selection.