Delay in Multi-Link Operation in ns-3: Validation and Impact of Traffic Splitting
Muyuan Shen, J.S. Zhang, Hao Yin, Sumit Roy, Yayu Gao · 2024
Wi-Fi is evolving towards enhanced support for real-time applications such as video conferencing and virtual reality (VR) gaming. The latest IEEE 802.11be draft standard introduces various advancements including multi-link operation (MLO) at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Such multi-link operation (effectively carrier aggregation) is anticipated to increase data throughput, and reduce access delay. Notably, the recent release of the ns-3 network simulator (ns-3.41) incorporates an implementation of MLO, enabling novel simulation-based analysis on the potential impact of link scheduling strategies on network delay. This paper begins with validation of end-to-end delay for the MLO implementation in ns-3 in a baseline scenario, and then proceeds to explore the impact of different link allocation strategies. Our observations reveal that across diverse scenarios, the outcomes derived from ns-3 align consistently with our theoretical model.