Sharing-Based Channel Access Procedure For Next Generation of Wireless LAN

Abstract

This paper proposes a new channel access procedure to mitigate the channel access contention in next generation of Wireless Local-Area Networks (WLANs) by allowing cooperation among devices belonging to same network, while maintaining high flexibility in terms of how each device may contend the medium. After introducing the details of the proposed procedure, which is here referred to as sharing-based protocol, an analytical analysis is provided to compare it with the two state-of-art protocols currently adopted in IEEE 802.11 standard, i.e, Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA)-based and trigger-based protocol. In this regards, closed form expressions are derived to evaluate the success probability of channel access for each protocol. In order to show the merit of the proposed procedure, a comprehensive system level analysis is also provided, which highlights that the proposed procedure outperforms the two state-of-art protocols in terms of mitigating the End-to-End (E2E) delay and allowing a better spectrum utilization by reducing the overall congestion in the system.