ProxySelect: Frequency Selectivity-Aware Scheduling for Joint OFDMA and MU-MIMO in 802.11ax WiFi

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Main Authors: Zhang, Xiang, Palaiologos, Michail, Bluemm, Christian, Caire, Giuseppe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Xiang
Palaiologos, Michail
Bluemm, Christian
Caire, Giuseppe
author_facet Zhang, Xiang
Palaiologos, Michail
Bluemm, Christian
Caire, Giuseppe
contents IEEE 802.11ax introduces orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) to WiFi to support concurrent transmissions to a larger number of users. As bandwidth continues to grow, WiFi channels exhibit increased frequency selectivity, which poses new challenges for MU-MIMO user selection: the optimal user set varies across frequency and is interleaved over subbands (called resource units, or RUs). This frequency selectivity, coupled with the complex subband allocation pattern, renders conventional narrowband user selection algorithms inefficient for 802.11ax. In this paper, we propose \emph{ProxySelect}, a scalable and frequency selectivity-aware user scheduling algorithm for joint OFDMA and MU-MIMO usage in 802.11ax under zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF). The scheduling task is formulated as an integer linear program (ILP) with binary variables indicating user (group)-RU associations, and linear constraints ensuring standard compatibility. To reduce complexity, we introduce a novel proxy rate--a function of individual channel strengths and their correlations--that approximates the ZFBF rate without requiring cubic-complexity matrix inversion. Additionally, we develop a sampling-based candidate group generation scheme that selects up to $T$ near-orthogonal user groups for each RU, thereby bounding the ILP size and ensuring scalability. Simulations using realistic ray-tracing-based channel models show that ProxySelect achieves near-optimal rate performance with significantly lower complexity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15452
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ProxySelect: Frequency Selectivity-Aware Scheduling for Joint OFDMA and MU-MIMO in 802.11ax WiFi
Zhang, Xiang
Palaiologos, Michail
Bluemm, Christian
Caire, Giuseppe
Information Theory
IEEE 802.11ax introduces orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) to WiFi to support concurrent transmissions to a larger number of users. As bandwidth continues to grow, WiFi channels exhibit increased frequency selectivity, which poses new challenges for MU-MIMO user selection: the optimal user set varies across frequency and is interleaved over subbands (called resource units, or RUs). This frequency selectivity, coupled with the complex subband allocation pattern, renders conventional narrowband user selection algorithms inefficient for 802.11ax. In this paper, we propose \emph{ProxySelect}, a scalable and frequency selectivity-aware user scheduling algorithm for joint OFDMA and MU-MIMO usage in 802.11ax under zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF). The scheduling task is formulated as an integer linear program (ILP) with binary variables indicating user (group)-RU associations, and linear constraints ensuring standard compatibility. To reduce complexity, we introduce a novel proxy rate--a function of individual channel strengths and their correlations--that approximates the ZFBF rate without requiring cubic-complexity matrix inversion. Additionally, we develop a sampling-based candidate group generation scheme that selects up to $T$ near-orthogonal user groups for each RU, thereby bounding the ILP size and ensuring scalability. Simulations using realistic ray-tracing-based channel models show that ProxySelect achieves near-optimal rate performance with significantly lower complexity.
title ProxySelect: Frequency Selectivity-Aware Scheduling for Joint OFDMA and MU-MIMO in 802.11ax WiFi
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15452