Multi-link operation is a new feature of IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT) that enables the utilization of multiple links using individual frequency channels to transmit and receive between EHT devices. This paper aims to illustrate enhanced multi-link channel access schemes, identify the associated coexistence challenge, and propose solutions. First, we describe the multi-link operation of IEEE 802.11be and how the asynchronous and synchronous channel access schemes facilitate multi-link utilization. Next, we describe the design variants of the synchronous channel access scheme and demonstrate the associated coexistence challenge. Subsequently, we propose four features to address this challenge by assigning penalties to multi-link devices (repicking a backoff count, doubling the contention window size, switching to another contention window set, and compensating the backoff count) as well as five coexistence solutions derived from combinations of these features. Comparative simulation results are provided and analyzed for dense single-spot and indoor random deployment scenarios, demonstrating that the throughput and latency gains of multi-link operation differ between schemes. At the same time, we investigate the coexistence performance of multi-link operation with and without the capability of simultaneous transmission and reception and demonstrate that the proposed solutions mitigate the coexistence problem. In particular, compensating the backoff count achieves the highest coexistence performance among the proposed solutions, with a marginal throughput decrease of multi-link devices. A metric for evaluating both the throughput and latency gains and the coexistence performance of a multi-link channel access scheme using a single value is also proposed.
Keywords: Extremely High Throughput; IEEE 802.11be; channel access; multi-link operation.