IEEE 802.11ax Target Wake Time: Design and Performance Analysis in ns-3
Shyam Krishnan Venkateswaran, Ching-Lun Tai, Roshni Garnayak, Yoav Ben-Yehezkel, Yaron Alpert, Raghupathy Sivakumar · 2024
With the growing density of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), effective management of these networks has become crucial. The Target Wake Time (TWT) feature of IEEE 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) has emerged as a pivotal tool to address this challenge. TWT can reduce or even eliminate medium contention between stations (STAs), granting the Access Point (AP) significantly improved scheduling capabilities compared to earlier standards. In this paper, we enhance the Wi-Fi module in Network Simulator-3 (ns-3) by designing and implementing TWT. We expect this implementation to be valuable for the research community, particularly for studying the advanced scheduling capabilities enabled by Wi-Fi 6. Additionally, we employ a real-world video streaming traffic model to analyze the impact of TWT parameters and AP-side scheduler policy on network-level key performance indicators (KPIs) and the energy consumption characteristics of STAs. Through extensive simulations, we provide key insights on the impact of TWT on throughput, latency, and STA energy efficiency for designing effective and practical TWT scheduling strategies.