Abstract
Many Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) workloads require deterministic service across heterogeneous links, yet commodity WLANs are contention-based. Although IEEE 802.11be introduced Restricted Target Wake Time (r-TWT) for prioritized access, its ability to robustly guarantee determinism in mixed deployments with legacy devices remains unverified. We propose a standards-aligned scheme that composes r-TWT, Quiet Time Period (QTP), and an optional Randomized Enqueue (RE) policy. These three mechanisms act in concert to protect the Scheduled Traffic (ST) service period (SP) while minimizing the impact on Non-Scheduled Traffic (NST). To analyze how the proposed scheme impacts existing WLANs, we focus the analysis on how the scheme reshapes the contention period (CP)-where opportunistic capacity is realized-by modeling SP/CP timing with renewal theory and embedding it into an EDCA Markov chain. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme protects ST determinism: ST throughput remains pinned to the ceiling with zero observed outage and bounded delay across a wide range of station counts. The proposed scheme minimizes NST throughput degradation in the system-peak throughput range (8-12 stations).