AP Coordination and Full-duplex enabled Multi-band Operation for the Next Generation WLAN: IEEE 802.11be (EHT)

Proliferating networking demands require the wireless local area networks (WLANs) to keep evolving. In May 2019, the IEEE 802 standards committee formally established the working group of the next generation WLAN: IEEE 802.11be. To satisfy the ultra-high definition video traffic and achieve the objective of extremely high throughput (EHT), multi-band operation (MB-Opr) is considered as one important technology. However, after deep analysis, simply adapting MB-Opr is not enough for the extremely high throughput requirements of IEEE 802.11be. This paper analyzes the possible schemes of AP coordination and full-duplex enabled MB-Opr, where AP coordination is also one key technology introduced by IEEE 802.11be. After that, we propose a MAC framework for AP coordination and full-duplex enabled MB-Opr that fits for all types of device capabilities. This framework is general enough that it has high scalability and good backward and forward compatibility. The simulation results confirm the performance advantages of proposed MAC framework and show that multi-band aggregation (MBA) and multi-band channel bonding (MBCB) outperform IEEE 802.11ax in throughput by 200% and 80.7%, respectively.