Performance Evaluation of the Giga-bit 802.11ac Based WLANs

Abstract

Wireless local area networks based on the legacy 802.11-1997 standard brought about a new era in wireless communications, enabling users to utilize the Internet anytime, anywhere. About two decades later, the IEEE 802.11ac amendment was released that broke the Gigabit-Ethernet barrier for wireless local area networks (WLANs). This amendment introduced improvements to the first and second layers (PHY and MAC) of the standard. The very high throughput was accomplished by improving the modulation mechanism, adding more spatial streams, utilizing broader channels, exploiting beam-forming techniques, and allowing for better frame aggregation. In this article, a simulation evaluation is conducted to investigate the performance of the 802.11ac considering the enhancements introduced by this amendment. The main metric used in this study is the system throughput. In addition, the average delay metric is also considered for investigation. Different simulation scenarios are considered to examine the previously mentioned features and enhancements. Results showed that the system throughput of 802.11ac increases with larger channel sizes, improved modulation schemes, and more spatial streams. The frame aggregation has been indicated to be an effective mechanism for alleviating unwanted overheads, which consequently increased the overall throughput.