Promise and perils of Dynamic Sensitivity control in IEEE 802.11ax WLANs

Dynamic sensitivity control (DSC) is being discussed within the new IEEE 802.11ax task group as one of the potential techniques to improve the system performance for next generation Wi-Fi in high capacity and dense deployment environments, e.g. stadiums, conference venues, shopping malls, etc. However, there appears to be lack of consensus regarding the adoption of DSC within the group. This paper reports on investigations into the performance of the baseline DSC technique proposed in the IEEE 802.11ax task group under realistic scenarios defined by the task group. Simulations were carried out and the results suggest that compared with the default case (no DSC), the use of DSC may lead to mixed results in terms of throughput and fairness with the gain varying depending on factors like inter-AP distance, node distribution, node density and the DSC margin value. Further, we also highlight avenues for mitigating the shortcomings of DSC found in this study.