On the performance of the spatial reuse operation in IEEE 802.11ax WLANs

Comunicació presentada a: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN) celebrat del 28 al 30 d'octubre a Granada, Espanya.The Spatial Reuse (SR) operation included in the IEEE 802.11ax-2020 (11ax) amendment aims at increasing the number of parallel transmissions in an Overlapping Basic Service Set (OBSS). However, many unknowns exist about the performance gains that can be achieved through SR. In this paper, we provide a brief introduction to the SR operation described in the IEEE 802.11ax (draft D4.0). Then, a simulation-based implementation is provided in order to explore the performance gains of the SR operation. Our results show the potential of using SR in different scenarios covering multiple network densities and traffic loads. In particular, we observe significant improvements on the channel utilization when applying SR with respect to the default configuration, thus allowing to increase the throughput and reduce the delay. Interestingly, the highest improvements provided by the SR operation are observed in the most pessimistic situations in terms of network density and traffic load.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the Maria de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502), by WINDMAL PGC2018-099959-BI00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER,UE), by the Catalan Government under SGR grant for research support (2017-SGR-11888), and by a Gift from the Cisco University Research Program (CG#890107, Towards Deterministic Channel Access in High-Density WLANs) Fund, a corporate advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The work by S. Barrachina-Munoz is supported by an FI grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya