QoS-Aware UL-OFDMA for Time-Sensitive Applications in Wi-Fi 6 Networks

Real-time applications are employed in today's pri-vate professional networks to support process handling and improve the efficiency of production. For supporting such applications, communication networks need to support deterministic communication with bounded low latency and high reliability. Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is used for such purposes, recently extended to wireless networks as well. To further improve the network catering to such real-time applications, it is crucial for end devices to expose their requirements to the network. On top of that, new wireless features like OFDMA, implemented in IEEE 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6), can improve wireless time-sensitive networks (W-TSNs) by improving communication efficiency. This paper looks at reducing the overhead of OFDMA and integrating UL-OFDMA with wireless TSN to support time-sensitive flows. We show that when both features are integrated, it reduces the latency by ~ 16 times compared to Wi-Fi with UL-OFDMA scenario while giving 50 % better air time utilization compared to the wireless TSN scenario.