Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11ac wireless backhaul networks in saturated conditions

Abstract

According to the ongoing IEEE 802.11ac amendment, the wireless network is about to embrace the gigabit-per-second raw data rate. Compared with previous IEEE standards, this significant performance improvement can be attributed to the novel physical and medium access control (MAC) features, such as multi-user multiple-input multiple-output transmissions, the frame aggregation, and the channel bonding. In this paper, we first briefly survey the main features of IEEE 802.11ac, and then, we evaluate these new features in a fully connected wireless mesh network using an analytic model and simulations. More specifically, the performance of the MAC scheme defined by IEEE 802.11ac, which employs the explicit compressed feedback (ECFB) mechanism for the channel sounding, is evaluated. In addition, we propose an extended request-to-send/clear-to-send scheme that integrates the ECFB operation to compare with the IEEE 802.11ac-defined one in saturated conditions. The comparison of the two MAC schemes is conducted through three spatial stream allocation algorithms. A simple but accurate analytical model is derived for the two MAC schemes, the results of which are validated with simulations. The observations of the results not only reveal the importance of spatial stream allocations but also provide insight into how the newly introduced features could affect the performance of IEEE 802.11ac-based wireless mesh networks.

Performance Analysis of IEEE 80.11ac Wireless Local Area Networks

“…The beamformee measures the channel and sends back this information to the beamformer. Consequently, the beamformer can accurately direct each beam to the target receiver [6]. The IEEE 802.11ac has increased the number of spatial streams (SS) up to eight SS at the access point compared to four spatial streams specified by 802.11n.…”

“…Using MU-MIMO, an AP can transmit packets concurrently to multiple clients in the same frequency spectrum at the same time (spatial reuse). However, to employ the MU-MIMO efficiently, the IEEE 802.11ac specifies that the maximum number of simultaneous beams directed to different nodes is four [3], [6]. That is, the maximum number of concurrent receivers of a MU-MIMO is four.…”

“…In addition, the authors specify some challenges for 802.11ac in order to support higher layers protocols. Alternatively, examining the channel sounding technique used in explicit estimating of channel conditions is reported in [6]. An extended request-to-send/clear-to-send is proposed and integrated with the explicit compressed feedback.…”

A MAC Performance of Mobile Ad hoc 802 11ac LAN Over Correlated Fading Channel

“…The data sender can also obtain CSI(Channel State Information) by estimating the training sequence included in MU-CTSs. The saturation throughput S can be calculated as follows [5,9].…”

“…The previous paper analyzed the IEEE 802.11b/g/a/n MAC performance for wireless LAN with error-free and errorprone channel [3,[5][6][7]. Papers related to IEEE 802.11ac also analyzed MAC throughput, but did not consider mobile ad-hoc and error-prone environment that is applied to most wireless LAN [8][9][10][11]. So, this paper extends the previous IEEE 802.11ac performance researches and analyzes the IEEE 802.11ac MAC performance for mobile ad-hoc LAN under the errorprone channel environment.…”