Since its first release in the late 1990s, Wi-Fi has been updated to keep up with evolving user needs. Recently, Wi-Fi and other radio access technologies have been pushed to their edge when serving Augmented Reality (AR) applications. AR applications require high throughput, low latency, and high reliability to ensure a high-quality user experience. The 802.11be amendment, which will be marketed as Wi-Fi 7, introduces several features that aim to enhance its capabilities to support challenging applications like AR. One of the main features introduced in this amendment is Multi-Link Operation (MLO) which allows nodes to transmit and receive over multiple links concurrently. When using MLO, traffic is distributed among links using an implementation-specific traffic-to-link allocation policy. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of MLO, using different policies, in serving AR applications compared to Single-Link (SL). Experimental simulations using an event-based Wi-Fi simulator have been conducted. Our results show the general superiority of MLO when serving AR applications. MLO achieves lower latency and serves a higher number of AR users compared to SL with the same frequency resources. In addition, increasing the number of links can improve the performance of MLO. Regarding traffic-to-link allocation policies, we found that policies can be more susceptible to channel blocking, resulting in possible performance degradation.

翻译：自20世纪90年代末首次发布以来，Wi-Fi不断更新以满足用户需求的演变。近年来，Wi-Fi及其他无线接入技术在服务增强现实（AR）应用时已接近性能极限。AR应用要求高吞吐量、低时延和高可靠性，以确保优质用户体验。即将以Wi-Fi 7名义推广的802.11be修正案引入了多项旨在增强其支持AR等挑战性应用能力的新特性。该修正案的主要特性之一是支持多链路操作（MLO），允许节点通过多条链路同时进行收发。使用MLO时，流量通过具体实现相关的流量-链路分配策略在各链路间分布。本文旨在评估采用不同策略的MLO在服务AR应用时相较于单链路（SL）的性能表现。我们通过基于事件的Wi-Fi模拟器进行了实验仿真。结果表明，MLO在服务AR应用时具有普遍优越性。在相同频率资源条件下，与SL相比，MLO实现了更低的时延并服务更多AR用户。此外，增加链路数量可提升MLO性能。关于流量-链路分配策略，我们发现部分策略更易受信道阻塞影响，可能导致性能下降。