Multi-AP Coordinated Spatial Reuse for Wi-Fi 8: Group Creation and Scheduling

TL;DR

This paper proposes a framework for multi-AP coordination in Wi-Fi 8, focusing on group creation and scheduling algorithms to enhance spatial reuse and network performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for periodic MAPC transmissions, including group creation and scheduling algorithms, to improve spatial reuse in Wi-Fi 8 networks.

Findings

Per-AP algorithms outperform per-Group algorithms in worst-case delay scenarios.

Scheduling based on individual AP buffer states yields better delay guarantees.

Group-based scheduling is less effective for delay-sensitive applications.

Abstract

Multi-Access Point Coordination (MAPC) will be a key feature in next generation Wi-Fi 8 networks. MAPC aims to improve the overall network performance by allowing Access Points (APs) to share time, frequency and/or spatial resources in a coordinated way, thus alleviating inter-AP contention and enabling new multi-AP channel access strategies. This paper introduces a framework to support periodic MAPC transmissions on top of current Wi-Fi operation. We first focus on the problem of creating multi-AP groups that can transmit simultaneously to leverage Spatial Reuse opportunities. Then, once these groups are created, we study different scheduling algorithms to determine which groups will transmit at every MAPC transmission. Two different types of algorithms are tested: per-AP, and per-Group. While per-AP algorithms base their scheduling decision on the buffer state of individual APs, per-Group algorithms do that taking into account the aggregate buffer state of all APs in a group. Obtained results -- targetting worst-case delay -- show that per-AP based algorithms outperform per-Group ones due to their ability to guarantee that the AP with a) more packets, or b) with the oldest waiting packet in the buffer is selected.