Multi-Connectivity with Joint Decoding for 802.11 bd Under Doubly-Selective Fading

Safety-critical driving applications such as emergency braking in a platoon require highly reliable low-latency communications. Since wireless data transmissions between vehicles are subject to fading radio channels, employing frequency diversity in terms of Multi-Connectivity (MC) is a promising approach to improve reliability under low latency constraints. Previous 802.11n link-level simulations of MC using Joint Decoding (JD) and Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) as combining schemes indicate a growing performance margin of JD over MRC for more selective fading. In this work, we extend these investigations towards a doubly-selective highway channel model and the current draft of 802.11bd. Our results show the benefit of midamble-based channel estimation and indicate a significant advantage of MC over a single link and of JD over MRC in particular for achieving reliable vehicular communications.