Resource Allocation with Padding Overhead in OFDMA based Next Generation 802.11 WLANs

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Abstract
Recently, IEEE 802.11ax Task Group has proposed new guidelines for the use of OFDMA-based medium access control. In this new framework, it has been decided that the transmission for all the users in an multi-user OFDMA should end end at the same time, and the users with insufficient data should transmit null data (i.e. padding) to fill the duration. While this scheme offers strong features such as resilience to Overlapping Basic Service Set (OBSS) interference and ease of synchronization, it also poses major side issues of degraded throughput performance and waste of devices' energy. We investigate resource allocation problems where the scheduling duration (i.e., time) is optimized through Lyapunov optimization techniques by taking into account the padding overhead, airtime fairness and energy consumption of the users. Also, being aware of the complexity of the existing OFDMA solutions, we propose lightweight and agile algorithms with the consideration of their overhead and implementation issues. We show that our resource allocation algorithms are arbitrarily close to the optimal performance at the price of reduced convergence rate.

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