Multi-Link Operation With Exponential Increasing and Exponential Decreasing Hybrid Contention Windows for Low-Latency WLANs

Multi-link operation (MLO) has attracted intensive interests since the emergence of Wi-Fi 7. In this letter, we propose and investigate the adoption of both exponential increasing and exponential decreasing contention windows (CWs) in MLO capable stations (STAs) for low-latency wireless local area networks (WLANs). By letting a MLO capable STA to alternately adopt increasing and decreasing CW updating rules for links when activating links for channel contention, the advantages of both adopting a small CW and adopting a large CW can be obtained, thereby benefiting the latency performance of WLANs. Simulation results reveal that our proposal can achieve considerable latency reduction compared to the conventional schemes, and is a promising scheme to achieve low latency for WLANs under MLO.