Simultaneous Multi-Channel Downlink 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. For certain channel combinations with insufficient frequency separation, STAs might not have the ability to simultaneously receive on one channel while transmitting on the other channel. Due to the independent medium access per-channel, there might be severe performance degradation of downlink throughput delivered to such constrained devices. To address this issue, we design and analyze Constraint-aware Aligned Downlink Ending (CADEN) protocol for simultaneous downlink transmissions over multiple channels that adaptively aligns the ending of the simultaneous downlink frames based on medium access conditions and reception capability of constrained STA. Our results show that our proposed mechanism consistently improves the downlink throughput delivered to constrained STAs under various network conditions.