Adaptive Access Control for UORA-Based IAMLO in Heterogeneous IEEE 802.11be Networks

Abstract

This paper studies uplink random access in a heterogeneous dual-link IEEE 802.11be network, where single-link devices (SLDs) and multi-link devices (MLDs) coexist under uplink OFDMA random access (UORA) and immediate-access multi-link operation (IAMLO). Although IAMLO can improve throughput and protect the access opportunities of SLDs, static access-parameter settings are difficult to adapt to changing SLD/MLD coexistence conditions, resulting in degraded throughput and coexistence performance. To address this problem, we propose a mean-field learning-based adaptive access control scheme, which uses the retransmission-stage occupancy distributions of different device classes as a compact system state and jointly adjusts the contention-window parameters and RU allocation on the two links. A coexistence-aware reward function is designed to improve total system throughput while preserving the access performance of SLDs on the shared 5 GHz link. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves IAMLO performance under different SLD/MLD coexistence settings, with an average throughput gain of about 18.7%.