Rate control with spatial reuse for Wi-Fi 6 dense deployments

Abstract

To improve the performance of Wi-Fi networks in dense deployments, the recent IEEE 802.11ax standard introduces a palette of features improving spatial reuse. A key property of these features is dynamic changes in transmit power and the interference from the neighboring devices. The paper explains the basic operation of spatial reuse features and shows that their efficiency significantly depends on how the stations select appropriate modulation and coding schemes taking into account the variable transmission conditions. Nevertheless, the majority of existing studies in the literature leave this effect out of consideration, assuming an ideal rate control algorithm and obtaining wrong results. The paper fills this gap and presents a novel statistics-based rate control algorithm that selects modulation and coding schemes taking into account the effects induced by the recent spatial reuse features. With extensive simulation, it is shown that the algorithm significantly outperforms the existing rate control algorithms, providing up to 50% higher goodput and three times lower latencies.