Queue-Aware Uplink Arbitration-based Contention and Downlink Resource Allocation for Multi-APs for IEEE 802.11ax WLANs
Li-Hsiang Shen, Kuan-Hsun Liao, Kai‐Ten Feng · 2022 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) · 2022
IEEE 802.11ax supports orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) separating the channel into multiple resource units (RUs), which achieves higher flexibility and diversity in terms of spectrum utilization compared to conventional 802.11 mechanisms. Benefited by multi-band resources, enormous stations (STAs) are allowed to access different bands for data transmission from the serving access points (APs). Conventional uplink (UL) OFDMA non-random access (UONRA) specified in 802.11ax confronts with the bottleneck of buffer state report phase which lacks appropriate scheduling and queueing information. Furthermore, dense scenario with multi-AP deployment for downlink (DL) data transfer is challenging to assign limited radio resources due to adjacent channel interference (ACI) problem. Based on the aforementioned issues, we propose an enhanced queue-aware arbitration-based contention and resource allocation (QCRA) scheme for joint UL arbitration-based contention and DL resource assignment to mitigate collision occurrence and severe interference. The proposed objective aims at maximizing the effective sum rate by jointly considering UL overhead and DL rate which is theoretically resolved via difference of concave (D.C.) method and Taylor approximation. Simulation results reveal that the proposed QCRA scheme outperforms the other existing benchmarks in open literatures in terms of both higher UL contention successful probability and effective DL sum rate.