Soft Channel Reservation Towards Latency Guarantee for the Next Generation WLAN: IEEE 802.11be

Real-time applications (RTAs) are a major challenge for wireless networks. The traditional wireless local area network (WLAN) adopts Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) in order to differentiate the quality of services (QoS) based on traffic priorities. However, for the high-dense scenario, the collisions frequently occur, thereby deteriorating both throughput and latency. The next generation WLAN standard: IEEE 802.11be aims to efficiently decrease the latency. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a soft channel in-band reservation protocol (SCRP). SCRP introduces channel reservation to alleviate channel collisions since the ongoing transmission piggybacking the predicted next transmission time. Moreover, a soft reservation canceling scheme is introduced to fully reuse the wireless resources. It means if the nodes who reserve the channel does not has packet to send at the reservation time, a low-overhead frame exchange may flexibly cancel the reservation and, in this case, other nodes can contend the channel resources. Simulation results show that SCRP significantly decreases the latency and improves the throughput of the entire network.