Performance Analysis of Synchronous Multilink MAC Protocol with Automatic Repeat Request

Abstract

Multilink operation (MLO) is considered a key candidate technique in 802.11be, which allows devices to transmit and receive data using multiple links concurrently, thereby contributing to improving throughput and reducing latency. However, the performance of the MLO scheme will gradually degrade as the channel environment deteriorates. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a synchronous multilink media access control (MAC) protocol with Automatic Repeat Request (called SML-ARQ). With SML-ARQ, in the contention process, MLDs are allowed to perform channel access procedures over multiple links concurrently; in the transmission process, MLDs partition a link packet into multiple blocks and then transmit these blocks using multiple links. Any failed division of a link packet is copied and retransmitted once using multiple channels concurrently; as a consequence, SML-ARQ can mitigate the adverse impact of transmission failure on system performance. A theoretical model is being developed to analyze the performance of the proposed SML-ARQ. Extensive simulations verify the efficiency of SML-ARQ and the accuracy of our theoretical model.