Abstract
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.
Highlights
IEEE 802.11 [1] is the de facto standard of the widely deployed wireless local area networks (WLANs)
The saturation throughput S, as shown in Equation 5, is expressed as the ratio of the frame payload successfully transmitted in a slot and the average duration of a slot, where γ is the probability that a slot is labeled as explicit compressed feedback (ECFB), number of aggregated MPDUs (Nf) is the number of frames in each aggregated MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU), and number of beams (Nb) is the number of parallel beams towards multiple nodes
5 Conclusions In this paper, a simple but accurate analytical model is presented for IEEE 802.11ac wireless mesh backhaul networks in saturated conditions
Summary
IEEE 802.11 [1] is the de facto standard of the widely deployed wireless local area networks (WLANs). The currently ongoing IEEE 802.11ac amendment [3] aims to provide an aggregated multi-station throughput of at least 1 gigabit per second in the 5-GHz band This performance improvement, compared to IEEE 802.11n [4], is obtained by introducing novel physical layer (PHY) and medium access control layer (MAC) features, including (1) wider channel bandwidths, (2) a higher modulation scheme, (3) downlink multi-user multiple-input multipleoutput (MU-MIMO) transmissions, and (4) a compulsory frame aggregation mechanism. We capture the most important features of IEEE 802.11ac (e.g., MU-MIMO, the channel sounding interval, the number of antennas, the size of aggregated frames, and the channel bandwidth) to get insight into how these parameters can affect the system performance.
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