Multi-AP coordination in Wi-Fi 7 exploiting time resources sharing

The multi-AP coordination is a key feature of Wi-Fi 7 (EHT) and is a promising approach to improving the utilization of limited radio resources. However, the APs coordination requires the exchange of information among the APs in the coordination set in order to make the optimal sharing decision with regard to specific performance parameters. In this work, we present the control frames defined for this purpose and the transmission procedures defined in EHT for the multi-AP coordination. We implemented the new frames and EHT procedures in ns-3. Furthermore, we designed and implemented a scheduler with the aim to improving the performance of EHT network in non-saturated conditions by sharing the time resources, i.e., C-TDMA. Then, we assessed the performance of the proposed scheduler in ns-3. Multi-AP coordination through C-TDMA allows for reduction of the network latency of one order of magnitude while keeping the network throughput stable.