Multi-link Operation in IEEE 802.11be WLANs

TL;DR

This paper reviews the multi-link operation feature in IEEE 802.11be WLANs, focusing on architectural changes and load balancing strategies to optimize performance in complex, high-load scenarios.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of IEEE 802.11be MLO modifications and evaluates load balancing strategies for effective traffic distribution over multiple links.

Findings

Congestion-aware load balancing improves performance in dense scenarios.

High load scenarios benefit significantly from multi-link traffic management.

MLO enables concurrent multi-radio transmissions for enhanced throughput.

Abstract

The multi-link operation (MLO) is a new feature proposed to be part of the IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT) amendment. Such feature represents a paradigm shift towards multi-link communications, as nodes will be allowed to transmit and receive data over multiple radio interfaces concurrently. To make it possible, the 802.11be Task Group has proposed different modifications in regards to nodes' architecture, transmission operation, and management functionalities. This article reviews such changes and tackles the question of how traffic should be distributed over multiple links, as it is still unresolved. To that end, we evaluate different load balancing strategies over the active links. Results show that in high load, dense and complex scenarios, implementing congestion-aware load balancing policies to significantly enhance next-generation WLAN performance using MLO is a must.