Modeling the Coexistence Performance between Wi-Fi 7 and legacy Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi 7 introduces Multi-link operation (MLO) to enhance throughput and latency performance compared to previous Wi-Fi standards. MLO enables simultaneous transmission and reception through multiple links, departing from conventional single-link operations (SLO). To fully exploit MLO's potential, it is essential to investigate Wi-Fi 7's coexistence performance with legacy Wi-Fi devices. Existing approaches, however, have overlooked some crucial aspects of MLO, necessitating the development of a standards-compliant analytical framework to model the actual channel access mechanism of MLO. Therefore, this research aims to addresses this gap by constructing an accurate Markov chain model for MLO aligned with the backoff behaviors specified by the standard, and by deriving closed-form expressions for the throughput of each device type in the Wi-Fi 7 and legacy Wi-Fi coexistence scenario.