Contention-free Scheduling of Periodic Traffic Sources in WiGig: Simulation Framework and Performance Analysis

The latest IEEE 802.11 amendments provide support to directional communications in the Millimeter Wave spectrum, thus making it possible to wirelessly approach several emerging use cases, such as eXtended Reality (XR), telepresence, and remote control of industrial facilities. However, these applications require stringent Quality of Service (QoS), that only contention-free scheduling algorithms can guarantee. In this paper, we propose a framework for the joint admission control and scheduling of periodic traffic streams over mmWave Wireless Local Area Networks based on Network Simulator 3 (ns-3), a popular full-stack open-source network simulator. Moreover, we design a baseline algorithm to handle scheduling requests, and evaluate its performance with a full-stack perspective. The algorithm is tested in three scenarios, where we investigated different configurations and features to highlight the trade-offs between contention-based and contention-free access strategies.