Double-Stage UORA to Meet the Requirements of IOT Applications Operating Over Wi-Fi 7

Internet of Things (IoT) applications have seen exponential growth in the past several years. High throughput, wide bandwidth, Large number of connected devices, and high reliability in such applications are highly desirable. Therefore, the underlying network must be capable of meeting these strict requirements. The next WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks) standard, known as IEEE 802.11be, is set to be the key enabler of IoT applications with a set of expected features and innovative techniques. Particularly, the OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) transmission technique allows to multiple users to be served at the same time in both DL (DownLink) and UL (Up-Link) directions without interference, thereby increasing throughput and channel efficiency. However, some issues related to the operation rules of standard UORA (UL OFDMA Random Access) protocol that handles the functioning of OFDMA communications at MAC layer in UL direction (backoff decrementing procedure, allocation of resource units, etc.) should be addressed in order to meet the requirements of IoT applications. To achieve this goal, we propose in this paper a new version of UORA protocol called DS-UORA (DoubleStage UORA) whose basic principle is reducing contention for radio resource units by firstly sensing their state information. Simulations have been run to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DS-UORA protocol.