Enabling real-time applications in Wi-Fi networks

Abstract

Being of high importance, real-time applications, such as online gaming, real-time video streaming, virtual reality, and remote-control drone and robots, introduce many challenges to the developers of wireless networks. Such applications pose strict requirements on the delay and packet loss ratio, and it is hardly possible to satisfy them in Wi-Fi networks that use random channel access. The article presents a novel approach to enable real-time communications by exploiting an additional radio. This approach was recently proposed by us in the IEEE 802.11 Working Group and attracted much attention. To evaluate its gain and to study how real-time traffic coexists with the usual one, a mathematical model is designed. The numerical results show that the proposed approach allows decreasing the losses and delays for the real-time traffic by orders of magnitude, while the throughput for the usual traffic is reduced insignificantly in comparison to existing networks.