  Multi-connectivity with packet duplication, where the same data packet is
duplicated and transmitted from multiple transmitters, is proposed in 5G New
Radio as a reliability enhancement feature. This paper presents an analytical
study of the outage probability enhancement with multi-connectivity, and
analyses its cost in terms of resource usage. The performance analysis is
further compared against conventional single-connectivity transmission. Our
analysis shows that, for transmission with a given block error rate target,
multi-connectivity results in more than an order of magnitude outage
probability improvement over the baseline single-connectivity scheme. However,
such gains are achieved at the cost of almost doubling the amount of radio
resources used. Multi-connectivity should thus be selectively used such that
its benefits can be harnessed for critical users, while the price to pay in
terms of resource utilization is simultaneously minimized.
