Evaluating multi-connectivity in 5G NR systems with mixture of unicast and multicast traffic

The future 5G New Radio (NR) systems are expected to support both multicast and unicast traffic. However, these traffic types require principally different NR system parameters. Particularly, the area covered by a single antenna configuration needs to be maximized when serving multicast traffic to efficiently use system resources. This prevents the system from using the maximum allowed number of antenna elements decreasing the inter-site distance between NR base stations. In this paper, we formulate a model of NR system with multi-connectivity capability serving a mixture of unicast and multicast traffic types. We show that multi-connectivity enables a trade-off between new and ongoing session drop probabilities for both unicast and multicast traffic types. Furthermore, supporting just two simultaneously active links allows to exploit most of the gains and the value of adding additional links is negligible. We also show that the service specifics implicitly prioritize multicast sessions over unicast ones. If one needs to achieve a balance between unicast and multicast session drop probabilities, explicit prioritization mechanism is needed at NR base stations.