Development of an advanced algorithm for sensitivity control of the service area of the IEEE 802.11ах Standards

DOI: 10.31673/2412-9070.2020.045056

Abstract

The article examines the technical features of the new 802.11ax standard, which for convenience has been assigned the abbreviation Wi-Fi 6. These include: support for 2.4 and 5 GHz bands; OFDMA support; joint work of MU-MIMO and OFDMA; Target Wake Time function. OFDM technology divides data channels into multiple subcarriers, providing higher connection and network reliability. In 802.11ax, the number of subcarriers quadruples due to the long OFDM guard interval. This will help increase the network coverage, and, accordingly, the speed of Wi-Fi 6 by 11%. With channel widths up to 160 MHz, 802.11ax provides incredible connection speeds. Thus, 802.11ax increases performance by simultaneously transmitting up to 8 data streams to multiple clients simultaneously. In addition, Wi-Fi 6 supports the MU-MIMO option for the output channel, when one antenna transmits data to one subscriber. A study of the effectiveness of the IEEE 802.11ax standard, that is, BSS Color, and the effect of the service area overlap threshold in various cases was carried out. An improved algorithm for controlling the sensitivity of setting the threshold for overlapping service areas both at access points and at mobile stations is proposed, which does not require significant changes at the MAC level. An advanced sensitivity control algorithm adjusts coverage overlap based on the observed interference level and the received signal strength from the respective receiver. The improved sensitivity control algorithm was compared to dynamic sensitivity control, an algorithm that was first proposed to clean up the channel and was also used in Wi-Fi 6 to adjust the coverage threshold overlap. The improved sensitivity control algorithm has been shown to outperform the aforementioned schemes (up to 47% in terms of increased throughput) in most simulated cases, while maintaining fairness among users. On the other hand, the improved sensitivity control algorithm increases the transmission capabilities of mobile stations (roughly the same probability for all users in the service area), which also leads to a higher level of contention. However, user contention can be controlled by other means specially designed to deal with it, such as channel flush threshold and contention window size.

Keywords: Wi-Fi 6; OFDM; MU-MIMO; BSS Color; IEEE 802.11ax; wireless local area networks; dynamic sensitivity control; advanced sensitivity control algorithm.

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