Awesome work! It's just too bad ath9k equipped routers are starting to be a bit hard to find..
And since ath9k is the only blob-free driver, prospects for fixing other drivers are not that bright.
Disclaimer: I'm not involved in any of this work myself, the above is my imperfect understanding of the situation. I'm just a happy owner and user of a ath9k router.
I think the possibility of fixing existing hardware in bufferbloat project was always limited at best. What can happen, though, is that good research results would find their way to vendors. Then, slowly, the issues would be fixed in new firmware blobs.
I had assumed the situation was better as I've had great results with the TP-Link AC1750 and Openwrt. Everything is well supported and works fast. But that has moved on to the ath10k which is now blob-based like the other drivers so these kinds of fixes are now normal hardware bugs and not something someone can hack independently.
Most of this is limited to the ath9k driver. ath10k is blob based and seems to have poor quality control as well as poor maintenance judging from all the bugs that go unanswered.
From the abstract: "The implementation has been accepted into the mainline kernel distribution, making it available for deployment on billions of devices running Linux today."
As mangix said, it is not a question of "having this version in router's kernel" because it depends strictly on the kind of chip the hardware uses. Most Wi-Fi chips use their own program which is called "a binary blob", they do not use the Wi-Fi stack of Linux except as a wrapper around their own code, which is not accessible in source, only in binary.
This is why for example in Ubuntu (but also in most other Linux distributions) there are "third party codes" that are "not free".
And since ath9k is the only blob-free driver, prospects for fixing other drivers are not that bright.
Disclaimer: I'm not involved in any of this work myself, the above is my imperfect understanding of the situation. I'm just a happy owner and user of a ath9k router.