Effects of Heterogeneous Mobility on D2D-and Drone-Assisted Mission-Critical MTC in 5G

mcMTC is starting to play a central role in the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem and have the potential to create high-revenue businesses, including intelligent transportation systems, energy/smart grid control, public safety services, and high-end wearable applications. Consequently, in the 5G of wireless networks, mcMTC have imposed a wide range of requirements on the enabling technology, such as low power, high reliability, and low latency connectivity. Recognizing these challenges, the recent and ongoing releases of LTE systems incorporate support for low-cost and enhanced coverage, reduced latency, and high reliability for devices at varying levels of mobility. In this article, we examine the effects of heterogeneous user and device mobility produced by a mixture of various mobility patterns on the performance of mcMTC across three representative scenarios within a multi-connectivity SC network. We establish that the availability of alternative connectivity options, such as D2D links and drone-assisted access, helps meet the requirements of mcMTC applications in a wide range of scenarios, including industrial automation, vehicular connectivity, and urban communications. In particular, we confirm improvements of up to 40 percent in link availability and reliability with the use of proximate connections on top of the cellular-only baseline.