On Spatial Reuse Potential for Wireless LANs

Abstract

Spatial reuse is an approach to better utilize the wireless medium by allowing a certain level of interference between parallel transmitting links. This paper presents a systematic approach to model networks of interfering links. Two proposed algorithms identify best sets for transmit power and rate allocation per link and allow to estimate the spatial reuse potential for a given scenario. Two introduced spatial reuse indicators help to benchmark the performance of any algorithm against the spatial reuse potential. An IEEE 802.11ax simulation using a fading channel model shows that a scheduler can use the identified best sets to increase overall system throughput. For a given example scenario the performance increase is 50 % compared to CSMA/CA time multiplexed channel access. The simulation also shows that IEEE 802.11ax OBSS_PD based spatial reuse does not utilize the full spatial reuse potential.