SLA-MLO: Congestion-Aware SLA-Based Scheduling of Multiple Links in IEEE 802.11 be

As technology advances and factories adopt the industry 4.0 paradigm, the demand for low latency and highly reliable wireless connectivity becomes more crucial than ever. To cater to these challenges multi-link operation (MLO) is a new feature introduced in IEEE 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) that requires scheduling packets in a station across multiple Wi-Fi links. This paper proposes SLA-MLO, which is a novel MLO scheduler for industrial communications designed to manage per-flow Service Level Agreement (SLA), where an SLA is defined as a maximum allowed percentile latency. We evaluate SLA-MLO by means of NS-3 packet-level simulations and compare it against a state-of-the-art MLO mechanism that schedules packets based on instantaneous per-link congestion measurements. Our results show that SLA-MLO achieves an average reduction in SLA deviation of 50 %.