With Multi-Connectivity Toward Reliable and Time-Sensitive Wi-Fi Systems: A Survey

Abstract

Wi-Fi has become a fundamental wireless communication technology, supporting a wide range of applications while continuing to evolve to meet increasingly demanding use cases. Future Wi-Fi networks are expected to support industrial and time-sensitive applications that require low-latency and highly reliable communication, thereby driving the need for further advancements in wireless communication technologies. Whereas earlier Wi-Fi standards primarily focused on increasing data rates, recent generations emphasize efficient resource allocation and performance under stringent latency requirements. Multi-Connectivity (MC) has emerged as a promising approach to bridge the gap between the capabilities of current Wi-Fi standards and the communication requirements of industrial and real-time applications. This survey provides a comprehensive, mechanism-centric review of MC in the IEEE 802.11 family, with particular emphasis on time-sensitive communication. We systematically classify and analyze the literature according to the three canonical MC scheduling strategies: Load Balancing (LB), Packet Duplication (PD), and Packet Splitting (PS), and discuss their evolution toward more adaptive and intelligent scheduling frameworks for emerging wireless networks. Furthermore, we provide a comparative analysis of existing scheduling approaches, highlighting the fundamental trade-offs among reliability, latency, spectral efficiency, resource utilization, and implementation complexity. Finally, we discuss the key research challenges and future directions for enabling deterministic and scalable MC in next-generation Wi-Fi systems, with emphasis on bounded-latency communication, adaptive scheduling, and practical deployment considerations. These insights provide a foundation for the design of robust, intelligent, and time-sensitive wireless communication systems.