Abstract
The representative media access control (MAC) mechanism of IEEE 802.11 is a distributed coordination function (DCF), which operates based on carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) with binary exponential backoff. The next amendment of IEEE 802.11 being developed for future Wi-Fi by the task group-be is called IEEE 802.11be, where the multi-link operation is mainly discussed when it comes to MAC layer operation. The multi-link operation discussed in IEEE 802.11be allows multi-link devices to establish multiple links and operate them simultaneously. Since the medium access on a link may affect the other links, and the conventional MAC mechanism has just taken account of a single link, the DCF should be used after careful consideration for multi-link operation. In this paper, we summarize the DCFs being reviewed to support the multi-radio multi-link operation in IEEE 802.11be and analyze their performance using the Markov chain model. Throughout the extensive performance evaluation, we summarize each MAC protocol’s pros and cons and discuss essential findings of the candidate MAC protocols.
Highlights
We classify the mentioned multi-link distributed coordination function (DCF) according to the channel access methodology into four following four multi-link DCFs and compare them: (1) single-link access (SLA) [5,6,7], (2) multi-link access with the shortest backoff (MLA-S) [4,5,8,9,10], (3) multi-link access with the longest backoff (MLA-L) [12,16], and (4) multi-link access with end-time alignment (MLA-A) [4,9,17]
That the Markov Chain has been constructed, we can solve τMLA−S which we introduced in Equation (3)
Throughout the extensive analysis results, asynchronous transmission on simultaneously transmit and receive (STR) outperformed other DCF schemes. This is because the asynchronous transmission on STR could operate independently on each link, which made better use of time resources
Summary
Among new features newly introduced in IEEE 802.11be Release 1, multi-link operation, which enables a single physical device to establish multiple links and operate them simultaneously, is the most representative feature of the IEEE 802.11be in that the multi-link operation can provide efficient use of the available spectrum. It can achieve higher data rates than the conventional single-link operation and can implement load balancing. 802.11be, and describes synchronous and asynchronous multi-link operations based on the multi-link architecture
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