Resource Management for OFDMA based Next Generation 802.11ax WLANs

TL;DR

This paper proposes fixed and dynamic scheduling algorithms for OFDMA-based 802.11ax WLANs to improve throughput, energy efficiency, and fairness, addressing padding overhead and synchronization issues.

Contribution

It introduces practical fixed and adaptive resource allocation algorithms for OFDMA WLANs, analyzed via Lyapunov optimization, enhancing performance and energy efficiency.

Findings

Algorithms achieve near-optimal performance

Dynamic scheduling reduces padding overhead

Energy consumption is optimized

Abstract

Recently, IEEE 802.11ax Task Group has adapted OFDMA as a new technique for enabling multi-user transmission. It has been also decided that the scheduling duration should be same for all the users in a multi-user OFDMA so that the transmission of the users should end at the same time. In order to realize that condition, the users with insufficient data should transmit null data (i.e. padding) to fill the duration. While this scheme offers strong features such as resilience to Overlapping Basic Service Set (OBSS) interference and ease of synchronization, it also poses major side issues of degraded throughput performance and waste of devices' energy. In this work, for OFDMA based 802.11 WLANs we first propose practical algorithm in which the scheduling duration is fixed and does not change from time to time. In the second algorithm the scheduling duration is dynamically determined in a resource allocation framework by taking into account the padding overhead, airtime fairness and energy consumption of the users. We analytically investigate our resource allocation problems through Lyapunov optimization techniques and show that our algorithms are arbitrarily close to the optimal performance at the price of reduced convergence rate. We also calculate the overhead of our algorithms in a realistic set-up and propose solutions for the implementation issues.