Multi-AP Coordination PHY/MAC Management for Industrial Wi-Fi

Abstract

This work discusses Access Point Coordination techniques for future 802.11 communications in the context of industrial Wireless TSN scenarios. A Coordinated OFDMA setup is proposed with a frame exchange scheme based on implicit wireless channel sounding prior to transmission. The scheduler assigns resource units to the users, trying to maximize the probability of all the STAs in the network to successfully deliver their data. In order to evaluate the quality of the channels without introducing overhead in the network, we propose a virtual sounding mechanism. We present simulation results first to validate the virtual sounding mechanism and, second, to show the achievable reliability of a Multi-AP network for a set of representative scenarios. These results highlight that Multi-AP can be effectively used to enhance the reliability of the network though special attention must be taken for time-varying scenarios.