Spatial Reuse in IEEE 802.11ax: Whether and How to Use in Practice

IEEE 802.11ax is a protocol being developed for high-density Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). Several algorithms have been proposed to improve the level of spatial reuse applied in IEEE 802.11ax. However, these algorithms are tentative and do not specify how to select the transmit power and carrier sense threshold in practice; It is unclear when and why the tuned parameters lead to better network performance. In this paper, we restricted the scale of transmit power tuning to prevent the case of backfire in which spatial reuse will result in transmission failure. If the restrictions cannot be satisfied, spatial reuse will be abandoned. This is why we named the proposed scheme as Arbitration based Spatial Reuse (ASR). We quantified the network performance after spatial reuse, and formulate a corresponding maximum problem whose solution is the optimal carrier sense threshold and transmit power. We verified our theoretical analysis by simulation and compared it with previous studies, and the results show that ASR improves the throughput up to 8.6% compared with 802.11ax. ASR can avoid failure of spatial reuse, while the spatial reuse failure rate of existing schemes can up to 36%. To use the ASR scheme in practice, we investigate the relation between the optimal carrier sense threshold and transmit power. Based on the relations got from ASR, the proposed Relation based Spatial Reuse (RSR) scheme can get a satisfactory performance by using only the interference perceived and the previously found relations.