Paper on multilink operation accepted for IEEE CSCN

The IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN) will take place from Wednesday, December 15th to Friday, December 17th. The paper “Analyses of NSTR Multi-link Operation in the Presence of Legacy Devices in an IEEE 802.11be Network”, authored by WNL members Ilya Levitsky and Evgeny Khorov and a Huawei Moscow Research Center member Nikolay Korolev, is accepted for this conference.

This paper focuses on the upcoming IEEE 802.11be standard, aka Wi-Fi 7, which introduces native support for the multilink operation. It allows Wi-Fi 7 devices to use several links located at different frequency channels simultaneously. However, in some cases, e.g., when the links operate on the channels close to each other, cross-link interference prevents sensing the channel on one link while transmitting on the other one. Thus, at any moment in time, such a device shall not perform simultaneous transmission and receptions, but should only do synchronous transmission or synchronous reception.

In the presence of legacy devices that support only one link, the channel state on different links becomes not synchronized, which reduces the probability of starting transmission on both links synchronously. Intuitively, to improve performance, the devices shall try to align their transmissions with ongoing ones, which should allow them to start simultaneous transmission on both links next time. With extensive simulation in various scenarios, this paper shows that the performance of multilink devices degrades in the presence of legacy devices and the described intuitive approach only improves the performance of legacy devices rather than multilink devices.

IEEE CSCN 2021 will be an excellent networking and publicity event with strong presence of industry, offering the opportunity for academics and industrial people to meet and exchange ideas and information. IEEE CSCN aims for closing the gap between researchers, scientists and standards experts from academia, industry and different standardization bodies. It will serve as a platform for presenting and discussing standards-related topics in the areas of communications, networking and related disciplines, facilitating standards development as well as cooperation among the key players. To find more information about the conference, visit the IEEE CSCN 2021 cite.