In the dynamic landscape of Industry 4.0, robust wireless connectivity emerges as a critical enabler for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. With the advent of Wi-Fi 7’s multilink operation (MLO), the demand for schedulers capable of meeting diverse Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements within industrial environments becomes paramount. Addressing this need, this paper introduces Cooperative SLA-MLO (C-SLA-MLO), a novel distributed multilink scheduler that balances data across MLO channels to fulfill the SLA of STAs operating within the same BSS. We provide a simulation-based evaluation where we compare C-SLA-MLO with other benchmark approaches, in terms of SLA compliance when varying the SLA characteristics, the level of QoS, or background traffic, showcasing an average reduction of 90% in SLA deviation in the industrial use case. This study contributes practical insights for enhancing wireless connectivity in IIoT, offering potential benefits for industrial network optimization by exploiting the MLO feature brought by the new IEEE 802.11be.
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