Latency Impact for Massive Real-Time Applications on Multi Link Operation

The next generation Wi-Fi7 technology is being developed by IEEE 802.11be group to support real-time applications (RTAs) that require extremely low latency such as online video games and VR/AR applications. To support RTA, high performance needs to be ensured for the worst-case latency, not just average latency. However, since a Wi-Fi network essentially operates based on access category (AC) using EDCA mechanism, even RTA traffic should be allocated for priority order traffic. This pertains to the problem of long delay encountered during channel access, which results in applications not being guaranteed for extremely low latency. This paper proposes a new EDCA operation for supporting RTA in 802.11be, which is in the process of standard development. As a result of extensive simulation, it was confirmed that there is 76.57% less average latency on 802.11be through the proposed EDCA operation on applications such as real-time gaming compared to the original multi-user EDCA (MU-EDCA) mechanism.