Experimental Hardware Implementation of Trigger Based Scheduled MAC for Next Generation Wi-Fi

Emerging applications in the wireless domain such as factory automation or extended reality require high reliable and deterministic communications. New scheduling mechanisms introduced in current state-of-the-art Wi-Fi (i.e. 802.11ax, 802.11be) offer better performance, but in many cases not sufficient to meet the requirements of the aforementioned applications. In this paper, we present a hardware implementation of Scheduled Time-Sensitive Transmission Opportunity (S-TXOP) over Wi-Fi, S-TXOP provides accurate time synchronization and time-aware scheduling to enable highly efficient deterministic wireless communications. We describe a field-programmable gate array software-defined radio S-TXOP implementation, and show numerical and experimental results supporting low cycle time transmissions with determinism.