Wireless local area networks (WLANs) empowered by IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) hold a dominant position in providing Internet access thanks to their freedom of deployment and configuration as well as the existence of affordable and highly interoperable devices. The Wi-Fi community is currently deploying Wi-Fi 6 and developing Wi-Fi 7, which will bring higher data rates, better multi-user and multi-AP support, and, most importantly, improved configuration flexibility. These technical innovations, including the plethora of configuration parameters, are making next-generation WLANs exceedingly complex as the dependencies between parameters and their joint optimization usually have a non-linear impact on network performance. The complexity is further increased in the case of dense deployments and coexistence in shared bands. While classical optimization approaches fail in such conditions, machine learning (ML) is able to handle complexity. Much research has been published on using ML to improve Wi-Fi performance and solutions are slowly being adopted in existing deployments. In this survey, we adopt a structured approach to describe the various Wi-Fi areas where ML is applied. To this end, we analyze over 250 papers in the field, providing readers with an overview of the main trends. Based on this review, we identify specific open challenges and provide general future research directions.
IEEE 802.11be -Extremely High Throughput-, commercially known as Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi) 7 is the newest IEEE 802.11 amendment that comes to address the increasingly throughput hungry services such as Ultra High Definition (4K/8K) Video and Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR). To do so, IEEE 802.11be presents a set of novel features that will boost the Wi-Fi technology to its edge. Among them, Multi-Link Operation (MLO) devices are anticipated to become a reality, leaving Single-Link Operation (SLO) Wi-Fi in the past. To achieve superior throughput and very low latency, a careful design approa…
The IEEE 802.11ac standard introduces new downlink multi-user MIMO (DL-MU-MIMO) transmissions to up to four users in order to increase spatial reuse in wireless local area networks (WLANs). We argue that even better WLAN per- formance can be achieved by slightly modifying the DL-MU-MIMO scheduling. To this end we propose a new queuing mechanism based on the decoupling of EDCA and DL-MU-MIMO scheduling (DEMS) to avoid head-of-line blocking. We show that DEMS outperforms traditional 802.11ac scheduling based on first in, first out transmission queues. The improvement is shown in terms throughput…
The IEEE 802.11 backoff algorithm is very important for controlling system throughput over contentionbased wireless networks. For this reason, there are many studies on wireless network performance focus on developing backoff algorithms. However, most existing models are based on saturated traffic loads, which are not a real representation of actual network conditions. In this paper, a dynamic control backoff time algorithm is proposed to enhance both delay and throughput performance of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function. This algorithm considers the distinction between high and…
Most of the IEEE 802.16e Mobile WiMAX scheduling proposals for real-time traffic using Unsolicited Grant Service (UGS) focus on the throughput and the guaranteed latency. The delay variation or delay jitter and the effect of burst overhead have not yet been investigated. This paper introduces a new technique called Swapping Min-Max (SWIM) for UGS scheduling that not only meets the delay constraint with optimal throughput, but also minimizes the delay jitter and burst overhead.
The increasing interest for ubiquitous networking, and the tremendous popularity gained by IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) in recent years, is leading to very dense deployments where high levels of channel contention may prevent to meet the increasing users' demands. To mitigate the negative effects of channel contention, the Target Wake Time (TWT) mechanism included in the IEEE 802.11ax amendment can have a significant role, as it provides an extremely simple but effective mechanism to schedule transmissions in time. Moreover, in addition to reduce the contention between stat…
IEEE 802.16m amends the IEEE 802.16 Wireless MAN-OFDMA specification to provide an advanced air interface for operation in licenced bands. It will meet the cellular layer requirements of IMT-Advanced next generation mobile networks. It will be designed to provide significantly improved performance compared to other high rate broadband cellular network systems. For the next generation mobile networks, it is important to consider increasing peak, sustained data reates, corresponding spectral efficiencies, system capacity and cell coverage as well as decreasing latency and providing QoS while car…
The multi-link operation (MLO) is a key feature of the next IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput amendment. Through its adoption, it is expected to enhance users' experience by improving throughput rates and latency. However, potential MLO gains are tied to how traffic is distributed across the multiple radio interfaces. In this paper, we introduce a traffic manager atop MLO, and evaluate different high-level traffic-to-link allocation policies to distribute incoming traffic over the set of enabled interfaces. Following a flow-level approach, we compare both non-dynamic and dynamic traffic …
Cellular phones, wireless laptops, personal portable devices that supports both voice and data access are all examples of communicating devices that uses wireless communication. Sine TCP/IP (and UDP) is the dominant technology in use in the internet, it is expected that they will be used (and they are currently) over wireless connections. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the TCP (and UDP) over IEEE802.11 wireless MAC protocol. We investigate the performance of the TCP and UDP assuming three different traffic patterns. First bulk transmission where the main concern is the throug…
Performance improvement has been among the foci of all previous amendments of IEEE 802.11 protocol. In addition, the draft high efficiency (HE) amendment IEEE 802.11ax, proposed by TGax, aims at increasing network performance. One of the main obstacles to improving spectral and power efficiency is the presence of hidden terminals which degrade throughput, in particular in uplink transmission. IEEE 802.11ax does provide mechanisms such as trigger based uplink transmission that mitigate this degradation to some extent, but are incapable of eliminating it, esp. at high arrival rates. To combat th…
Previous studies have shown that the actual handoff schemes employed in the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs (WLANs) do not meet the strict delay constraints placed by many multimedia applications like Voice over IP. Both the active and the passive supported scan modes in the standard handoff procedure have important delay that affects the Quality of Service (QoS) required by the real-time communications over 802.11 networks. In addition, the problem is further compounded by the fact that limited coverage areas of Access Points (APs) occupied in 802.11 infrastructure WLANs create frequent handoffs. W…
Traffic safety applications using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is an emerging and promising area within the ITS environment. Many of these applications require real-time communication with high reliability. To meet a real-time deadline, timely and predictable access to the channel is paramount. The medium access method used in 802.11p, CSMA with collision avoidance, does not guarantee channel access before a finite deadline. The well-known property of CSMA is undesirable for critical communications scenarios. The simulation results reveal that a specific vehicle is forced to drop ove…
Multi-user spatial multiplexing combined with packet aggregation can significantly increase the performance of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). In this letter, we present and evaluate a simple technique to perform packet aggregation in IEEE 802.11ac MU-MIMO (Multi-user Multiple Input Multiple Output) WLANs. Results show that in non-saturation conditions both the number of active stations (STAs) and the queue size have a significant impact on the system performance. If the number of stations is excessively high, the heterogeneity of destinations in the packets contained in the queue makes …
In highly-dense IEEE 802.11 deployments, areas covered by multiple Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) will be common. This opens the door for stations equipped with multiple IEEE 802.11 interfaces to use several WLANs simultaneously, which not only may improve user experience, achieving a better connection with higher throughput and resilience; but it may also improve the network utilization. In this paper we investigate such a scenario. First, using a test-bed, consisting of a single station equipped with two interfaces and two access points, we observe that the file transfer time between t…
In this paper, we research the feasibility of adapting the packet coalescing algorithm, used successfully in IEEE 802.3az Ethernet cards, to upstream EPON channels. Our simulation experiments show that, using this algorithm, great power savings are feasible without requiring any changes to the deployed access network infrastructure nor to protocols.
We consider a tree network spanning a set of source nodes that generate measurement packets, a set of additional relay nodes that only forward packets from the sources, and a data sink. We assume that the paths from the sources to the sink have bounded hop count. We assume that the nodes use the IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA for medium access control, and that there are no hidden terminals. In this setting, starting with a set of simple fixed point equations, we derive sufficient conditions for the tree network to approximately satisfy certain given QoS targets such as end-to-end delivery probability …
With recent advancements, the wireless local area network (WLAN) or wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology has been successfully utilized to realize sensing functionalities such as detection, localization, and recognition. However, the WLANs standards are developed mainly for the purpose of communication, and thus may not be able to meet the stringent sensing requirements in emerging applications. To resolve this issue, a new Task Group (TG), namely IEEE 802.11bf, has been established by the IEEE 802.11 working group, with the objective of creating a new amendment to the WLAN standard to provide…
The fleet management of mobile working machines with the help of connectivity can increase safety and productivity. Although in our previous study, we proposed a solution to use IEEE 802.11p to achieve the fleet management of construction machines, the shortcoming of WIFI may limit the usage of this technology in some cases. Alternatively, the fifth-generation mobile networks (5G) have shown great potential to solve the problems. Thus, as the world's first academic paper investigating 5G and construction machines' cooperation, we demonstrated the scenarios where 5G can have a significant effec…
Handoff performance of NEMO BS protocol with existent improvement proposals is still not sufficient for real time and QoS-sensitive applications and further optimizations are needed. When dealing with single homed NEMO, handoff latency and packet loss become irreducible all optimizations included, so that it is impossible to meet requirements of the above applications. Then, How to combine the different Fast handoff approaches remains an open research issue and needs more investigation. In this paper, we propose a new Infrastructure independent handoff approach combining multihoming and intell…
Intelligent Channel Allocation for IEEE 802.11be Multi-Link Operation: When MAB Meets LLM
School of Informatics, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学电子与计算机工程系）
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) group "IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE 802.15.4e" (6TiSCH) introduced a protocol, utilizing Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) from IEEE802.15.4e due to its high reliability and time-deterministic characteristic, that achieves industrial performance requirements while offering the benefits of IP connectivity. This work proposes the addition of a second radio interface in 6TiSCH devices to operate a parallel network in sub-GHz, introducing transmit diversity while benefiting from decreased path-loss and reduced interference. Simulation results show an…
The need for cables with high-fidelity Virtual Reality (VR) headsets remains a stumbling block on the path towards interactive multi-user VR. Due to strict latency constraints, designing fully wireless headsets is challenging, with the few commercially available solutions being expensive. These solutions use proprietary millimeter wave (mmWave) communications technologies, as extremely high frequencies are needed to meet the throughput and latency requirements of VR applications. In this work, we investigate whether such a system could be built using specification-compliant IEEE 802.11ad hardw…
Next-generation Home WiFi networks have to step forward in terms of performance. New applications such as on-line games, virtual reality or high quality video contents will further demand higher throughput levels, as well as low latency. Beyond physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) improvements, deploying multiple access points (APs) in a given area may significantly contribute to achieve those performance goals by simply improving average coverage and data rates. However, it opens a new challenge: to determine the best AP for each given station (STA). This article studies the achieva…
Distributed Multi-Agent Deep Q-Learning for Fast Roaming in IEEE 802.11ax Wi-Fi Systems
Institute of Artificial Intelligence innovation, Industry Academia Innovation School（产业创新学院人工智能创新研究所）；Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering（电子与电气工程系）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）
Now a day ad hoc mobile networks (MANETs) have lots of routing protocols, but no one can meet maximum performance. Some are good in a small network; some are suitable in large networks, and some give better performance in location or global networks. Today modern and innovative applications for health care environments based on a wireless network are being developed in the commercial sectors. The emerging wireless networks are rapidly becoming a fundamental part of every single field of life. Our proposed DEERP framework gives a better performance as compared to other routing protocol.
With the exponential increase in mobile users, the mobile data demand has grown tremendously. To meet these demands, cellular operators are constantly innovating to enhance the capacity of cellular systems. Consequently, operators have been reusing the licensed spectrum spatially, by deploying 4G/LTE small cells (e.g., Femto Cells) in the past. However, despite the use of small cells, licensed spectrum will be unable to meet the consistently rising data traffic because of data-intensive applications such as augmented reality or virtual reality (AR/VR) and on-the-go high-definition video stream…
Mission critical Machine-type Communication, also referred to as Ultra-reliable Low Latency Communication is primarily characterized by communication that provides ultra-high reliability and very low latency to concurrently transmit short commands to a massive number of connected devices. While the reduction in PHY layer overhead and improvement in channel coding techniques are pivotal in reducing latency and improving reliability, the current wireless standards dedicated to support mcMTC rely heavily on adopting the bottom layers of general-purpose wireless standards and customizing only the …
School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机与信息工程学院）；Faculty of Information Technology, Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学信息技术学院）；State key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学网络与交换技术国家重点实验室）
With the ever-improving computing capabilities and storage capacities of mobile devices in line with evolving telecommunication network paradigms, there has been an explosion of research interest towards exploring Distributed Learning (DL) frameworks to realize stringent key performance indicators (KPIs) that are expected in next-generation/6G cellular networks. In conjunction with Edge Computing, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as the DL architecture of choice in prominent wireless applications. This article lays an outline of how DL in general and FL-based strategies specifically can con…
