The multi-link operation (MLO) is a key feature of the next IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput amendment. Through its adoption, it is expected to enhance users’ experience by improving throughput rates and latency. However, potential MLO gains are tied to how traffic is distributed across the multiple radio interfaces. In this letter, we introduce a traffic manager atop MLO, and evaluate different high-level traffic-to-link allocation policies to distribute incoming traffic over the set of enabled interfaces. Following a flow-level approach, we compare both non-dynamic and dynamic traffic balancing policy types. The results show that the use of a dynamic policy, along with MLO, allows to significantly reduce the congestion suffered by traffic flows, enhancing the traffic delivery in all the evaluated scenarios, and in particular improving the quality of service received by video flows. Moreover, we show that the adoption of MLO in future Wi-Fi networks improves also the coexistence with non-MLO networks, which results in performance gains for both MLO and non-MLO networks.

中文翻译：

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IEEE 802.11be 多链路 WLAN 中的动态流量分配

多链路操作 (MLO) 是下一个 IEEE 802.11be 极高吞吐量修正案的一个关键特性。通过采用它，有望通过提高吞吐率和延迟来增强用户体验。然而，潜在的 MLO 增益与流量在多个无线电接口之间的分布方式有关。在这封信中，我们在 MLO 上介绍了一个流量管理器，并评估了不同的高级流量到链路分配策略，以通过一组启用的接口分配传入流量。按照流级方法，我们比较了非动态和动态流量平衡策略类型。结果表明，动态策略和 MLO 的使用可以显着减少交通流遭受的拥塞，增强所有评估场景中的交通交付，尤其是提高视频流接收的服务质量。此外，我们表明，在未来的 Wi-Fi 网络中采用 MLO 还可以改善与非 MLO 网络的共存性，从而提高 MLO 和非 MLO 网络的性能。