Transmission Delay-Based Uplink Multi-User Scheduling in IEEE 802.11ax Networks

As the demands for uplink traffic increase, improving the uplink throughput has attracted research attention in IEEE 802.11 networks. To avoid excessive competition among stations and enhance the uplink throughput performance, the IEEE 802.11ax standard supports uplink multi-user transmission scenarios, in which AP triggers certain stations in a network to transmit uplink data simultaneously. The performance of uplink multi-user transmissions highly depends on the scheduler, and station scheduling is still an open research area in IEEE-802.11ax-based networks. In this paper, we propose a transmission delay-based uplink multi-user scheduling method. The proposed method consists of two steps. In the first step, the proposed method makcreateses station clusters so that stations in each cluster have similar expected transmission delays. The transmission delay-based station clustering increases the ues of uplink data channels during the uplink multi-user transmission scenario specified in IEEE 802.11ax. In the second step, the proposed method selects cluster for uplink multi-user transmissions. The cluster selection can be performed with a proportional fair-based approach. With the highly channel-efficient station cluster, the proposed scheduling method increases network throughput performance. Through the IEEE 802.11ax standard compliant simulations, we verify the network throughput performance of the proposed uplink scheduling method.