TXOP sharing with Coordinated Spatial Reuse in Multi-AP Cooperative IEEE 802.11be WLANs

TL;DR

This paper explores coordinated TXOP sharing strategies in Wi-Fi 7 networks, demonstrating that combining time division and spatial reuse significantly boosts throughput in multi-AP WLANs.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates a novel coordinated TXOP sharing approach with spatial reuse, achieving substantial throughput improvements over traditional methods.

Findings

c-TDMA alone offers limited throughput gains.

c-TDMA/SR achieves over 140% higher throughput in most scenarios.

A fair scheduler optimally selects parallel transmissions and power levels.

Abstract

IEEE 802.11be networks (aka Wi-Fi 7) will have to cope with new bandwidth-hungry and low-latency services such as eXtended Reality and multi-party cloud gaming. With this goal in mind, transmit opportunity (TXOP) sharing between coordinated access points (APs) may contribute to alleviating inter-AP contention, hence increasing the overall network throughput. This paper evaluates two coordinated TXOP sharing strategies: coordinated time division multiple access (c-TDMA) and coordinated-TDMA with spatial reuse (c-TDMA/SR). We show that, while c-TDMA alone does not result in any significant improvement in terms of the WLAN throughput, it lays the groundwork to implement coordinated SR (c-SR) techniques. To evaluate the performance of c-TDMA/SR, we propose a fair scheduler able to select the best subset of parallel transmissions in WLAN deployments, as well as the appropriate power levels to be used by APs and stations (STAs), leading to maximum performance. The results obtained for c-TDMA/SR show significant throughput gains compared with c-TDMA, with values higher than 140% in 90% of the considered scenarios.