The current era of AI presents unprecedented challenges to Wi-Fi ecosystems, requiring the scalability to support an abundance of ubiquitous AI devices with stringent demands in latency and reliability. Their traffic patterns become increasingly heterogeneous and overall capacity needs, especially in uplink direction, soar. For such demanding applications, Fiber To The Room (FTTR) systems offer a reliable wired backbone to interconnect multiple wireless access points (APs) optically, with highest throughput and lowest latency. On the Wi-Fi side, an ideal framework to support challenging AI devices is Multi-link Operation (MLO), which has been introduced with the latest 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) standard. Simultaneous use of multiple radio bands (2.4, 5, or 6 GHz) for a single connection significantly extends capacity.In this paper, we propose to leverage the combination of these two key technologies, FTTR and MLO, by centralized access to network state information of multiple APs. Central MLO link selection and traffic distribution over multiple APs improves performance in terms of interference, scheduling, and load-balancing. To this end, we model an FTTR network with the ns-3 framework with end-to-end UDP packet transmission. The mean system latency is evaluated, which shows improvement of around 17%, thanks to centrally controlled MLO functions through the optical backbone.     «

The current era of AI presents unprecedented challenges to Wi-Fi ecosystems, requiring the scalability to support an abundance of ubiquitous AI devices with stringent demands in latency and reliability. Their traffic patterns become increasingly heterogeneous and overall capacity needs, especially in uplink direction, soar. For such demanding applications, Fiber To The Room (FTTR) systems offer a reliable wired backbone to interconnect multiple wireless access points (APs) optically, with highes...     »