Co-NOMA: AP Coordination Based NOMA Protocol for the Next-Generation WLANs

In recent years, with the ever-increase connectivity, high-density deployment scenarios have become important scenarios for future wireless networks. Achieving extreme high throughput (EHT) in high-density deployment scenarios is the technical goal of IEEE 802.11be, the next generation wireless local area network (WLAN) standard. However, the severe interference and suppression relationship between basic service set (BSS) in the high-density deployment scenario causes the throughput of the WLAN to be very severely affected. Therefore, this paper proposes an access point (AP) coordination-based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) protocol named Co-NOMA for the next generation WLANs standard. Its core idea is to transform the relationship between interference and suppression between neighboring BSS into a relationship of mutual coordination and assistance through AP coordination and NOMA methods. Specifically, this article first designed the media access control (MAC) protocol based on AP coordination technique and NOMA method. Moreover, the protocol and its frame structure have good backward compatibility. According to the theoretical analysis, the proposed AP coordination based NOMA scheme has significant performance gains which is proved in the simulation.