Channel Bonding Effects of the IEEE802.11n Standard on the WLANs Performance

Abstract

The evolution of wireless communication technologies has led to the widespread adoption of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). IEEE 802.11n provides many enhancements in physical and MAC layers such as (channel bonding(CB), Multiple Input/Output (MIMO), frame aggregation and block acknowledgment) to achieve higher throughput and improved reliability. As a result, CB is a key technique for enhancing the performance of wireless network. It is frequently used in various fields, such as workplace networks and live streaming. This research paper focuses on analyzing the effect of channel bonding on the performance of the IEEE802.11n WLANs, especially in two terms (throughput and delay). By using the OPNET (Riverbed) Modular version 17.5, five various number of nodes (5, 10, 15, 18 and 30 nodes) uniform topologies are modeled and simulated to investigate the WLANs performance for various MIMO up to 4 SS. Simulation outcomes indicated that applying of CB enhanced both delay and velocity performance. Specifically, in the scenarios (30 nodes), for MIMO (4×4) spatial streams, the average throughput value for channel bonding is (157.28 Mbps) compared to (87.41 Mbps) for no-channel bonding, and the average delay value for channel bonding is (0.0476 Sec) compared to (0.06762 Sec) for no-channel bonding. The enhancement values in the performance of WLANs are 42% and 79.9% for latency and throughput (velocity), respectively.