López Raventós, ÁlvaroBellalta, Boris2023-02-012023-02-012021López-Raventós A, Bellalta B. IEEE 802.11be multi-link operation: when the best could be to use only a single interface. In: 19th Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet); 2021 Jun 15-17; [online]. [United States]: IEEE; 2021. [7] p. DOI: 10.1109/MedComNet52149.2021.9501237http://hdl.handle.net/10230/55515Comunicació presentada a: MedComNet 2021 celebrat del 15 a 17 de juny de 2021 en línia.The multi-link operation (MLO) is a new feature proposed to be part of the IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT) amendment. Through MLO, access points and stations will be provided with the capabilities to transmit and receive data from the same traffic flow over multiple radio interfaces. However, the question on how traffic flows should be distributed over the different interfaces to maximize the WLAN performance is still unresolved. To that end, we evaluate in this article different traffic allocation policies, under a wide variety of scenarios and traffic loads, in order to shed some light on that question. The obtained results confirm that congestion-aware policies outperform static ones. However, and more importantly, the results also reveal that traffic flows become highly vulnerable to the activity of neighboring networks when they are distributed across multiple links. As a result, the best performance is obtained when a new arriving flow is simply assigned entirely to the emptiest interface.application/pdfeng© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MedComNet52149.2021.9501237info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObjecthttp://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MedComNet52149.2021.9501237WiFi 7IEEE 802.11beMulti-link OperationPerformance EvaluationWLANsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/embargoedAccess