Performance Evaluation of MLO for XR Streaming: Can Wi-Fi 7 Meet the Expectations?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Wi-Fi 7's Multi-Link Operation (MLO) for XR streaming, demonstrating its potential to meet strict throughput and delay requirements through simulation, and highlighting its advantages over single-link operation.

Contribution

The study provides the first simulation-based analysis of Wi-Fi 7 MLO's effectiveness for XR, showing its ability to reduce delay and support more users compared to traditional single-link setups.

Findings

MLO can sustain VR applications effectively.

MLO reduces overall delay, especially in uplink.

More MLO links with narrow channels lower delays.

Abstract

Extended Reality (XR) has stringent throughput and delay requirements that are hard to meet with current wireless technologies. Missing these requirements can lead to worsened picture quality, perceived lag between user input and corresponding output, and even dizziness for the end user. In this paper, we study the capability of upcoming Wi-Fi 7, and its novel support for Multi-Link Operation (MLO), to cope with these tight requirements. Our study is based on simulation results extracted from an MLO-compliant simulator that realistically reproduces VR traffic. Results show that MLO can sustain VR applications. By jointly using multiple links with independent channel access procedures, MLO can reduce the overall delay, which is especially useful in the uplink, as it has more stringent requirements than the downlink, and is instrumental in delivering the expected performance. We show that using MLO can allow more users per network than an equivalent number of links using SLO. We also show that while maintaining the same overall bandwidth, a higher number of MLO links with narrow channels leads to lower delays than a lower number of links with wider channels.