Spatial Reuse Insights for IEEE 802.11ax and IEEE 802.11be Wireless LANs and Beyond

The published IEEE 802.11ax standard introduces spatial reuse to WLAN and the upcoming IEEE 802.11be standard expands spatial reuse to multiple operation modes under the topic of multi-access point coordination. Literature shows that there is potentially a high performance increase to WLAN by using spatial reuse in selected scenarios. However, there is little work about general evaluation of spatial reuse and its potential application. Using simple two-link network examples, this paper discusses power domain related different versions of spatial reuse from an operating point and performance perspective. The discussion may help to structure application scenarios of spatial reuse for potential yield of additional system performance and decreased latency. Finally, the derived conclusions allow optimizing spatial reuse algorithms from research and can be useful for manufacturers to implement decision points for spatial reuse in actual hardware.