Impact of TWT Scheduling Overlap on Latency for Next Generation WLANs: An Experimental Study

With the emergence of time-sensitive applications, such as virtual reality and online gaming, low latency has become a critical requirement for wireless communication systems. In wireless LANs (WLANs), the target wake time (TWT), introduced in the IEEE 802.11ax standard, has attracted attention as a mechanism to achieve low latency. In this study, through a measurement campaign involving multiple access points (APs), we verified the feasibility of TWT-based multi-AP coordinated scheduling for low-latency WLANs, currently under discussion for standardization as IEEE 802.11bn. Since the TWT mechanism schedules communication service periods for each station (STA), we investigated the impact of multi-STA TWT scheduling on the latency and throughput. The experimental results revealed that eliminating the overlap of communication service periods with TWT is effective for achieving low-latency WLANs, regardless of whether it is a single AP or multiple APs.