Delay Jitter Analysis and Optimization for Multi-Connectivity Enabled Delay-Deterministic Wireless Networks

Industrial control systems impose stringent requirements on wireless networks, especially low delay jitter. Due to limited communication resources and time-varying channels, wireless networks usually experience random delay and even packet loss, resulting in high delay jitter. The short frame structure and finite blocklength coding (FBC) technology in the current 5G/B5G system reduce delay but cause a high error rate, hindering single-connection (SC) systems from being deterministic. Multi-connection (MC) technology enhances determinism by adding redundant transmission links. We consider an MC-based wireless control system in which the same data packet is transmitted by multiple controllers, with beamforming performed at the transmitter. Two transmission schemes, namely, MC orthogonal transmission (MC-OT) and MC joint transmission (MC-JT), are considered. We first derive the delay jitter for both schemes and then formulate a delay jitter minimization problem to determine the optimal power allocation among different transmission links. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy of our theoretical derivations and approximations, as well as the superiority of our proposed power allocation algorithm.