Uplink Resource Allocation in IEEE 802.11ax

Abstract

One of the notable features of the upcoming Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) standard-namely, IEEE 802.11ax-is the use of Multi-User Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (MU-OFDMA). MU-OFDMA facilitates multiple users to transmit simultaneously in smaller sub-channels (a.k.a. resource units (RUs)), thereby improving the 802.11ax MAC efficiency. The 802.11ax MAC enables MU-OFDMA transmissions in the uplink (UL) by using two types of RUs: i) Random Access (RA) RUs, and ii) Scheduled Access (SA) RUs. In this paper, we investigate the impact of different distributions of RA RU and SA RU on the MAC layer performance. We leverage our analysis in devising a practical UL RU allocation scheme that maximizes the overall 802.11ax network throughput. We implement the 802.11ax MAC in network simulator-3 (NS-3) and perform extensive simulations to validate the efficacy of our proposed scheme.