Simultaneous Transmit-Receive Multi-Channel Operation in Next Generation WLANs

The next-generation IEEE 802.11 standard project, IEEE 802.11be, is focused to meet the growing demands of applications including high throughput, low latency and high reliability. With the emergence of dual-radio end user devices (STAs) and tri-band Access Points (APs), efficient operation over multiple channels distributed over multiple bands is a key technology being discussed in IEEE 802.11be task group to achieve the desired objectives. Due to insufficient channel separation in frequency, STAs might be unable to perform simultaneous transmit and receive operations over the multiple channels in an asynchronous manner. To maximize the medium utilization of such constrained STAs participating in asynchronous multi-channel operation, we design and analyze C onstraint A ware Async hronous multi-channel operation (CA-ASYNC) protocol that includes an opportunistic 802.11 backoff resumption technique applied by the constrained STAs and multichannel busy state indication by the AP to the constrained STAs. Our results show that (a) CA-ASYNC’s opportunistic backoff resumption technique significantly improves the medium utilization for constrained STAs compared to alternative strategies and (b) the multi-channel busy status indication significantly decreases the collisions due to constrained STAs and improves access delay performance.