Investigation and Evaluation of IEEE 802.11n WLANs Link Features Performance Under Single Host and Concurrent Communication

Abstract

For an efficient design of wireless local-area networks (WLANs), the simulation tools are important to accurately estimate the IEEE 802.11n/ac link features for WLANs. However, this true simulation of network behavior is critical in designing high-performance WLANs. Through testing, analysis, and modeling of the proposed scheme repetitively, the design of the WLAN can be enhanced with a small budget before making its practical implementation. Many network simulation tools have been established to give solutions for this request and ns-3 is the most widely used tools among them by the research industry as an open-source network simulator. In this paper, we examine the various link features of the 802.11n WLANs under several conditions. We investigate the effects of 802.11n WLAN modulation and coding schemes (MCSs), 20MHz single channel or 40 MHz bonded channel, guard intervals (GI), frame aggregation, data encoding, number of antennas and their data rate, and link distance features of 802.11n WLAN in ns-3 when only a unique host connects with the access point (AP) and generates data traffic. Besides, the performance for an enterprise scenario proposed by the IEEE 802.11ax study group is evaluated when several hosts are simultaneously creating traffic with their associated APs. The results demonstrate that ns-3 support most of the link features of the 802.11n protocol with significant accuracy.