Study of Band Allocation Policies in IEEE 802.11be Networks with Devices of Different Capabilities

The upcoming IEEE 802.11be standard aims to provide extremely high bitrates to support next generation use cases. Among the proposed features, multi-link operation (MLO) is probably the one contributing most towards this goal. MLO enables new types of devices, i.e., multi-link devices (MLDs), to transmit simultaneously over multiple frequency bands to achieve massive bitrates (reaching 40 Gbps) and, consequently, lower latency. However, the coexistence of MLDs with legacy devices in existing and future wireless local area network (WLAN) deployments has not yet been explicitly investigated. In this work, we investigate different band management policies over a three-band densely populated WLAN, allowing MLDs to use one or more bands for the access procedure and data transfer. We evaluate, via extensive simulations, the access delay of the devices and the network throughput with respect to the ratio of legacy devices and MLDs. We show that by using different band allocation policies for MLDs, several trade-offs regarding throughput and access delay arise that need careful consideration to avoid performance degradation.