Performance analysis of the 802.11ax UL OFDMA random access protocol in dense networks

Recently, 802.11ax has introduced uplink Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (UL OFDMA)-based random access transmission to provide uplink multiuser capability to stations (STA) with unknown buffer status. These STAs include those that are waking up from sleep and unassociated STAs trying to establish connection for the first time. Due to the absence of carrier sensing per resource unit, this procedure has a maximum efficiency of only about 37% for high number of STAs. The efficiency will decrease further without properly choosing the random access parameters. In this paper, we first build an analytical model of the performance of UL OFDMA random access transmission and verify it using simulations. In addition, we propose methods to optimize various random access parameters to maintain a system efficiency near the 37% limit. Simulation results show that our optimization methods can increase the throughput of UL OFDMA random access by as much as 39% when compared to randomly chosen parameters.