IBAC: An Intelligent Dynamic Bandwidth Channel Access Avoiding Outside Warning Range Problem
This addresses collision avoidance in wireless networks for improved efficiency, but it is incremental as it builds on existing DBCA mechanisms.
The paper tackles the Outside Warning Range Problem (OWRP) in IEEE 802.11ax's Dynamic Bandwidth Channel Access, which causes collisions during channel bonding, by proposing IBAC, a MAC mechanism that adapts bonding levels using a Thompson sampling approach, resulting in significant network performance enhancement compared to other mechanisms.
IEEE 802.11ax uses the concept of primary and secondary channels, leading to the Dynamic Bandwidth Channel Access (DBCA) mechanism. By applying DBCA, a wireless station can select a wider channel bandwidth, such as 40/80/160 MHz, by applying the channel bonding feature. However, during channel bonding, inappropriate bandwidth selection can cause collisions. Therefore, to avoid collisions, a well-developed media access control (MAC) protocol is crucial to effectively utilize the channel bonding mechanism. In this paper, we address a collision scenario, called Outside Warning Range Problem (OWRP), that may occur during DBCA when a wireless station interferes with another wireless station after channel bonding is performed. Therefore, we propose a MAC layer mechanism, Intelligent Bonding Avoiding Collision (IBAC), that adapts the channel bonding level in DBCA in order to avoid the OWRP. We first design a theoretical model based on Markov chains for DBCA while avoiding the OWRP. Based on this model, we design a Thompson sampling based Bayesian approach to select the best possible channel bonding level intelligently. We analyze the performance of the IBAC through simulations where it is observed that, comparing to other competing mechanisms, the proposed approach can enhance the network performance significantly while avoiding the OWRP.