Analysis of a Multi-Armed Bandit solution to improve the spatial reuse of next-generation WLANs

The next generation of WLANs will be, for the most part, ubiquitous in urban areas, densely deployed, and implementing the latest amendment of IEEE 802.11 standard, namely 802.11ax also known as Wi-Fi 6. Among the main purposes of 802.11ax is the improvement of the spatial reuse of radio channels by...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inComputer communications Vol. 193; pp. 279 - 292
Main Authors Bardou, Anthony, Begin, Thomas, Busson, Anthony
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.09.2022
Elsevier
Subjects
Computer Science
IEEE 802.11 WLANs
Machine Learning
Multi-Armed Bandits
Networking and Internet Architecture
Power control
Spatial reuse
Spatial reuse
Multi-Armed Bandits
IEEE 802.11 WLANs
Power control
Power Control
Spatial Reuse
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Summary:The next generation of WLANs will be, for the most part, ubiquitous in urban areas, densely deployed, and implementing the latest amendment of IEEE 802.11 standard, namely 802.11ax also known as Wi-Fi 6. Among the main purposes of 802.11ax is the improvement of the spatial reuse of radio channels by allowing the dynamical update of the sensitivity threshold and the transmission power at each node. In this regard, our contributions are twofold. First, we investigate the performance improvement resulting from a more efficient spatial reuse of radio channels with 802.11ax. Second, we introduce a centralized solution based on the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) framework and a sub-sampling technique to quickly discover an appropriate configuration of the sensitivity threshold and transmission power at each access point. We evaluate our solution with the network simulator ns-3 on different network topologies. The simulation results show the ability of our solution to quickly and robustly adjust these parameters of access points in order to significantly improve the behavior of WLANs.
ISSN:0140-3664
1873-703X
DOI:10.1016/j.comcom.2022.07.015