  Since its first release in the late 1990s, Wi-Fi has been updated to keep up
with evolving user needs. Recently, Wi-Fi and other radio access technologies
have been pushed to their edge when serving Augmented Reality (AR)
applications. AR applications require high throughput, low latency, and high
reliability to ensure a high-quality user experience. The 802.11be amendment,
which will be marketed as Wi-Fi 7, introduces several features that aim to
enhance its capabilities to support challenging applications like AR. One of
the main features introduced in this amendment is Multi-Link Operation (MLO)
which allows nodes to transmit and receive over multiple links concurrently.
When using MLO, traffic is distributed among links using an
implementation-specific traffic-to-link allocation policy. This paper aims to
evaluate the performance of MLO, using different policies, in serving AR
applications compared to Single-Link (SL). Experimental simulations using an
event-based Wi-Fi simulator have been conducted. Our results show the general
superiority of MLO when serving AR applications. MLO achieves lower latency and
serves a higher number of AR users compared to SL with the same frequency
resources. In addition, increasing the number of links can improve the
performance of MLO. Regarding traffic-to-link allocation policies, we found
that policies can be more susceptible to channel blocking, resulting in
possible performance degradation.
