On the Performance of the Spatial Reuse Operation in IEEE 802.11 ax WLANs
Published in IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN), 2019
Recommended citation: Wilhelmi, F., Barrachina-Muñoz, S., & Bellalta, B. (2019, October). On the Performance of the Spatial Reuse Operation in IEEE 802.11 ax WLANs. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications and Networking (CSCN) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Abstract: The Spatial Reuse (SR) operation included in the IEEE 802.11ax-2020 (11ax) amendment aims at increasing the number of parallel transmissions in an Overlapping Basic Service Set (OBSS). However, many unknowns exist about the performance gains that can be achieved through SR. In this paper, we provide a brief introduction to the SR operation described in the IEEE 802.11ax (draft D4.0). Then, a simulation-based implementation is provided in order to explore the performance gains of the SR operation. Our results show the potential of using SR in different scenarios covering multiple network densities and traffic loads. In particular, we observe significant performance gains when a WLAN applies SR with respect to the default configuration. Interestingly, the highest improvements are observed in the most pessimistic situations in terms of network density and traffic load.