Adaptive Scheduling for Low-Latency Coordination in Wi-Fi 8 Multi-AP Networks

Abstract

Reliable low-latency communication is a critical requirement in enterprise wireless networks such as hospitals, offices, and campuses. This paper proposes an earliest deadline first (EDF)-Lyapunov-Robbins-Monro (ELR), a stochastic scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.11bn (Wi-Fi 8) Multi-Access Point Coordination Coordinated-Spatial Reuse (MAPC C-SR) networks that jointly accounts for queue stability and deadline-aware latency regulation under bursty traffic. A Lyapunov drift-based criterion for a group is adopted to ensure queues remain stable under varying traffic loads. Since the optimal balance between queue backlog and deadline urgency cannot be determined a priori under bursty traffic, EDF term is incorporated into the selection metric with a tunable balance parameter $\alpha$, governed by Robbins-Monro stochastic approximation scheme. The proposed algorithm addresses the inability of existing schedulers to track sudden congestion under bursty traffic, by dynamically adjusting $\alpha$ to suppress sharp delay spikes. Simulations over a four-access point (AP) enterprise deployment under bursty Markov-Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP) traffic demonstrate that ELR achieves 14.23%, 13.26%, and 7.97% reduction in 99th percentile delay over maximum number of packets (MNP), oldest packet (OP), and traffic alignment tracker (TAT) respectively under high load with 16 stations (STAs).