Approach to Real-Time Communications in Wi-Fi Networks

—The development of wireless communication technologies attracts increased interest to scenarios that impose severe restrictions on data transmission reliability and latency. Such scenarios include real-time applications, such as industrial automation, remote control, video streaming, and virtual reality. It is very difficult to satisfy the requirements imposed on the quality of service with the currently widespread communication technologies. Specifically, it is currently impossible to guarantee a low delay in Wi-Fi networks due to some peculiarities of the applied channel access methods. In this work, we study an approach that provides a low latency and high reliability of communications in Wi-Fi networks on the basis of an additional radio air interface. This approach is studied using the mathematical model of a heterogeneous network, which consists of devices that generate prioritized and non-prioritized data packets. The results of studies show that this approach provides the ability to satisfy the requirements of real-time applications, when certain restrictions on the intensity of prioritized traffic are met. In this case, a decrease in the throughput for non-prioritized traffic is insignificant.