A Channel Reservation Mechanism in IEEE 802.11be for Multi-cell Scenarios

With the surge in demand for latency-sensitive traffic, the next-generation Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard IEEE 802.11be has recognized the improvement of worst-case latency and jitter as one of its core objectives. Reservation-based contention-free channel access scheme achieves lower latency. Nevertheless, the channel reservation still has some limitations. In a multi-cell scenario, the Access Point (AP) is not capable of managing external cell users, which will cause interference to the reserved users during the reservation period, resulting in deteriorating channel conditions and increasing latency. Hence, in this paper, we propose a channel reservation mechanism with multi-cell coordination capability, enabling the sharing of channel reservation information among different cell APs and restricting the corresponding users to remain in silence during the reservation period, to avoid interference from internal and external cell users on the reserved users. Moreover, we propose a management frame protection scheme based on channel reservation mechanism that reduces the probability of management frame loss by offering channel reservation to the management frames. The effectiveness of the channel reservation mechanism and the management frame protection scheme is verified by simulations. It is demonstrated that the latency of latency-sensitive traffic in a multi-cell scenario using the proposed mechanism is significantly improved over the existing works.