Reliability enhancements for mmW communication using IEEE 802.1CB

Abstract:
5G mmW deployments are well-suited for a wide range of industrial applications demanding high data rates. mmW transmissions are however prone to blockage and penetration losses in industrial environments. 5G mmW transmissions may show undesirably high packet delay variations caused by packet retransmissions, processing delays, protocol stack signaling, alignment delays with respect to the packet transmit opportunity, etc. In this work, we empirically study the use of IEEE 802.1CB protocol (also known as Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability) for 5G mmW communication. IEEE 802.1CB has two main functions: replication and elimination. IEEE 802.1CB protocol sends frames after replication on several disjoint paths. The elimination function deletes any redundant frames received. Our experimental results obtained in a real industrial environment on commercially available IEEE 802.1CB compliant hardware indicate that the use of IEEE 802.1CB protocol brings reliability enhancements and reduction of packet delay variations for 5G mmW transmissions.