The challenges of Scheduling and Resource Allocation in IEEE 802.11ad/ay

TL;DR

This paper reviews the complex scheduling and resource allocation challenges in IEEE 802.11ad/ay WiFi, emphasizing the need for advanced methods to manage directional mmWave communications and hybrid MAC features.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of open problems in IEEE 802.11ad/ay scheduling and proposes a workflow using heuristic and learning-based approaches to address them.

Findings

Identifies key challenges in channel access and scheduling.

Highlights the impact of directional communications on QoS.

Proposes a workflow combining heuristic and learning methods.

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11ad WiFi amendment enables short-range multi-gigabit communications in the unlicensed 60~GHz spectrum, unlocking new interesting applications such as wireless Augmented and Virtual Reality. The characteristics of the mmWave band and directional communications allow increasing the system throughput by scheduling pairs of nodes with low cross-interfering channels in the same time-frequency slot. On the other hand, this requires significantly more signaling overhead. Furthermore, IEEE 802.11ad introduces a hybrid MAC characterized by two different channel access mechanisms: contention-based and contention-free access periods. The coexistence of both access period types and the directionality typical of mmWave increase the channel access and scheduling complexity in IEEE 802.11ad compared to previous WiFi versions. Hence, to provide the Quality of Service (QoS) performance required by demanding applications, a proper resource scheduling mechanism that takes into account both directional communications and the newly added features of this WiFi amendment is needed. In this paper, we present a brief but comprehensive review of the open problems and challenges associated with channel access in IEEE 802.11ad and propose a workflow to tackle them via both heuristic and learning-based methods.