Multilink Operation in IEEE 802.11be Wireless LANs: Backoff Overflow Problem and Solutions

The next-generation wireless LAN standard named IEEE 802.11be supports a multilink operation to cost-efficiently boost throughput performance, for which an efficient multilink channel scheme is essential. The synchronous channel access scheme with an enhancement allowing multilink transmission before backoff completion greatly enhances the performance of multilink devices with no simultaneous transmit and receive capability, for which, however, backoff count compensation is necessary for coexistence with legacy and other multilink devices. In this paper, we identify the backoff count overflow problem of the enhanced synchronous channel access scheme with backoff compensation, which becomes aggravated once triggered due to repeated compensations. Then, we propose four solutions to mitigate this problem: limiting consecutive free-riding transmissions, limiting a compensated backoff value, using the contention window value of a main link, and balancing transmissions between links. Through comparative evaluation and analyses for dense single-spot and indoor random deployment scenarios, we demonstrate in terms of throughput and latency that the proposed solutions successfully mitigate the problem while preserving the coexistence performance.