Machine Learning for Scalable Multi-AP Coordination in IEEE 802.11bn Networks

Maksymilian Wojnar, Szymon Szott

As Wi-Fi deployments become denser, fully distributed random channel access no longer guarantees the required quality of service. The multi-access point coordination (MAPC) framework introduced in IEEE~802.11bn lets neighboring access points (APs) cooperate, but choosing which APs transmit together and how to configure them remains an open, computationally hard problem. We develop and validate a stack of machine learning (ML) coordination methods, progressing from lightweight hierarchical multi-armed bandits (H-MABs) to a generative pipeline built on graph neural networks (GNNs) and flow matching (FM). The methods are evaluated in simulation and on a hardware testbed, improving throughput over legacy access and scaling coordination to dozens of APs where analytical and search-based methods become intractable.