Smart Preliminary Channel Access to Support Real-Time Traffic in Wi-Fi Networks

Abstract

Real-time applications (RTA) are an important use case for IEEE 802.11be, a new amendment to the Wi-Fi standard. This amendment introduces new complicated mechanisms to provide low delay and high reliability for RTA, but many of them are not supported by legacy devices that may be present in future Wi-Fi networks. In contrast, the preliminary channel access (PCA) method is designed to satisfy strict RTA requirements even in the presence of legacy devices and does not require significant changes to the Wi-Fi protocol. However, it significantly reduces the capacity for non-RTA traffic. This paper introduces a Smart PCA method, which improves the performance of all the stations in scenarios with multiple RTA stations. Extensive simulation shows that the Smart PCA method guarantees low delays for intensive RTA traffic in these scenarios. Moreover, it doubles the network capacity for the stations with non-RTA traffic.

Keywords

• real-time applications
• Wi-Fi
• 802.11
• low delay
• reliability
• preliminary channel access