Coordinated Spatial Reuse for WiFi Networks: A Centralized Approach

Abstract

With ever-increasing throughput-hungry applications running over WiFi, such as Virtual and eXtended Reality (VR/XR), on the one hand and the need for deterministic communication on the other, network densification is not an option. With dense network deployment interference between overlapping basic service set (OBSS) become the main source of system throughput drop and packet delays, decreasing the benefits of dense network. With the latest WiFi 7 standard being standardized, access point (AP) coordination is one of the key features foreseen to be added. With increased interactions between APs from different OBSS, spatial reuse feature can benefit in determining accurately the levels of interference and modulation and coding scheme (MCS) index to be used for concurrent transmissions. In this paper we show a centralized Coordinated Spatial Reuse (C-SR) algorithm implemented in the network controller that determines the transmit powers of the concurrent AP transmitters based on calculated interference levels in the main receiver. In addition, the algorithm determines the MCS index for each concurrent transmission. In a test-bed measurement setup, we show that the overall system goodput is increased by 20% and 33%, respectively, for the network topology where receivers are positioned in the inner zone between APs. In addition, the communication latency is maintained below certain threshold, compared to cases where C-SR is not activated.