Wi-Fi Evolution for Future Dense Networks : Does Sensing Threshold Adaptation Help?

• Emerging Wi-Fi technologies are expected to cope with large amounts of traffic in dense networks. Consequently, proposals for the future IEEE 802.11ax Wi-Fi amendment include sensing threshold and transmit power adaptation, in order to improve spatial reuse. However, it is not yet understood to which extent such adaptive approaches - and which variant - would achieve a better balance between spatial reuse and the level of interference, in order to improve the network performance. Moreover, it is not clear how legacy Wi-Fi devices would be affected by new-generation Wi-Fi implementing these adaptive design parameters. In this paper we present a thorough comparative study in ns-3 for four major proposed adaptation algorithms and we compare their performance against legacy non-adaptive Wi-Fi. Additionally, we consider mixed populations where both legacy non-adaptive and new-generation adaptive populations coexist. We assume a dense indoor residential deployment and different numbers of available channels in the 5 Wiz band, relevant for future IEEE 802.11ax. Our results show that for the dense scenarios considered, the algorithms do not significantly improve the overall network performance compared to the legacy baseline, as they increase the throughput of some nodes, while decreasing the throughput of others. For mixed populations in dense deployments, adaptation algorithms that improve the performance of new-generation nodes degrade the performance of legacy nodes and vice versa. This suggests that to support Wi-Fi evolution for dense deployments and consistently increase the throughput throughout the network, more sophisticated algorithms are needed, e.g. considering combinations of input parameters in current variants.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Telekommunikation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Telecommunications (hsv//eng)

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