Efficient Management of Channel Bonding in the Current IEEE 802.11ac Standard

Abstract

IEEE 802.11ac is a Very High Throughput (VHT) Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) introduced to reach 7 Gbps over 5 GHz bandwidth. This data rate is achieved through several enhancements to the physical (PHY) layer and medium access control (MAC) sub-layer. Channel bonding is one of the new technologies introduced in IEEE 802.11ac that increases channel bandwidth by combining multiple 20 MHz channels. To access the wide channel, IEEE 802.11ac specified a multichannel MAC procedure, known as: Dynamic Multichannel Access (DMA) that operates under the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) operating rules. In this paper, we demonstrate that: (i) the basic rules of EDCA function causes the access equity problem between the data streams, (ii) the DMA procedure is not effectively managing the bandwidth allocated to the IEEE 802.11ac WLAN. This is why, our purpose in this work is proposing a new MAC procedure called EDMA (Enhanced Dynamic Multichannel Access) that enhances the existing DMA procedure, in order to efficiently use the radio resources while distributing them equitably on different data streams. The simulation results show that the new EDMA procedure provides satisfactory results (in terms of throughput) by comparing it with the DMA procedure.