Exploiting Scheduled Access Features of mmWave WLANs for Periodic Traffic Sources

TL;DR

This paper proposes two algorithms for scheduling periodic traffic in mmWave WLANs using Service Periods, addressing strict latency and reliability needs of multimedia and industrial applications, and compares their performance trade-offs.

Contribution

It introduces two novel algorithms for joint admission control and scheduling of periodic streams in mmWave WLANs, with contrasting performance objectives.

Findings

Simple scheduler trades acceptance rate for resource availability.

Max-min fair scheduler balances resource allocation but lacks tunable performance control.

Trade-offs between acceptance rate and fairness are characterized.

Abstract

Many current and future multimedia and industrial applications, like video streaming, eXtended Reality or remote robot control, are characterized by periodic data transmissions with strict latency and reliability constraints. In an effort to meet the stringent demand of such traffic sources, the WiGig standards support a contention-free channel access mechanism, named Service Period, that makes it possible to allocate dedicated time intervals to certain wireless stations. However, the standard only covers the fundamental aspects that ensure interoperability, while the actual schedule logic is left to vendors. In this paper, we propose two algorithms for joint admission control and scheduling of periodic traffic streams with contrasting performance objectives, specifically a simple scheduler and a max-min fair scheduler. The schemes are compared in two different scenarios, in order to characterize and highlight some fundamental trade-offs. As expected from their design principles, the simple scheduler tends to trade acceptance rate for resource availability, contrary to the max-min fair scheduler, giving to implementers a clear performance trade-off, although performance cannot be balanced by means of a tunable parameter.