Paper on Multi-link Analytical Model accepted for IEEE Wireless Communication Letters

The paper “Analytical Model of Multi-link Operation in Saturated Heterogeneous Wi-Fi 7 Networks”, authored by Nikolay Korolev, Ilya Levitsky, and Evgeny Khorov has been accepted for publication in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters.

The paper is dedicated to the most prominent feature of the upcoming standard of Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be) – the multi-link operation. It allows a Wi-Fi device to simultaneously transmit and receive packets via several links. However, when the spectral distance between two channels used by the links is small, crosslink interference caused by the transmission on one link can impair the reception on another link. For such cases, the 802.11be standard defines non-simultaneous transmit and receive (NSTR) mode, which is explained in the paper. The authors develop an analytical model of NSTR operation to compute the throughput in a saturated network with NSTR multi-link devices. Notably, the model accounts for coexistence of the being developed multi-link devices with devices currently used in Wi-Fi networks, which highly influences the behavior of the entire network. The results show that the NSTR nature of the multi-link devices does not allow the use classical Bianchi’s model, which necessitated the creation of a new model. The predictions of the newly developed analytical model match the simulation results very closely. They reveal that the channel resource distribution is fair for a channel access scheme to be standardized. However, the performance of NSTR multi-link devices is poor, if network contains a few of them, and they coexist with legacy devices in each link.

The paper will be published in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters – a first quartile (Q1) bimonthly scientific journal. It focuses on the physical layer and the link layer of wireless communication systems.