Attaining reliable communications traditionally relies on a closed-loop methodology but inevitably incurs a good amount of networking latency thanks to complicated feedback mechanism and signaling storm. Such a closed-loop methodology thus shackles the current cellular network with a tradeoff between high reliability and low latency. To completely avoid the latency induced by closed-loop communication, this article aims to study how to jointly employ open-loop communication and multi-cell association in a heterogeneous network (HetNet) so as to achieve ultra-reliable and low-latency communications. We first introduce how mobile users in a HetNet adopt the proposed proactive multi-cell association (PMCA) scheme to form their virtual cell that consists of multiple access points (APs) and then analyze the communication reliability and latency performances. We show that the communication reliability can be significantly improved by the PMCA scheme and maximized by optimizing the densities of the users and the APs. The analyses of the uplink and downlink delays are also accomplished, which show that extremely low latency can be fulfilled in the virtual cell of a single user if the PMCA scheme is adopted and the radio resources of each AP are appropriately allocated.

中文翻译：

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使用主动多小区关联的超可靠和低延迟通信

实现可靠的通信传统上依赖于闭环方法，但由于复杂的反馈机制和信令风暴，不可避免地会产生大量的网络延迟。因此，这种闭环方法通过在高可靠性和低延迟之间进行权衡来束缚当前的蜂窝网络。为了完全避免闭环通信带来的延迟，本文旨在研究如何在异构网络（HetNet）中联合使用开环通信和多小区关联，以实现超可靠和低延迟的通信。我们首先介绍 HetNet 中的移动用户如何采用所提出的主动多小区关联 (PMCA) 方案来形成由多个接入点 (AP) 组成的虚拟小区，然后分析通信可靠性和延迟性能。我们表明，PMCA 方案可以显着提高通信可靠性，并通过优化用户和 AP 的密度来最大化通信可靠性。对上下行时延的分析也表明，如果采用PMCA方案，合理分配每个AP的无线资源，单个用户的虚拟小区可以实现极低的时延。