Performance study and enhancement of multichannel access methods in the future generation VHT WLAN

Abstract

To meet the growing needs of Very High Throughputs (VHT) and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for audiovisual applications in the future generation Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), 80/160 MHz multichannel transmissions are introduced in the new IEEE 802.11ac WLAN standard. Hence, Static and Dynamic multichannel access methods are proposed at 802.11ac Medium Access Control (MAC) layer level, allowing 80/160 MHz channel bonding. In this paper, we aim at studying and enhancing Static and Dynamic multichannel access methods, by taking into account the Transmission Opportunity Limit (TXOPLimit), which is a promising burst transmission to achieve differentiated QoS. So, we propose a new Dynamic multichannel access method (called, Enhanced Dynamic), which brings together the benefits of Static and Dynamic multichannel access methods, while avoiding their deficiencies. A comparative study between Static, Dynamic and Enhanced Dynamic methods, is conducted after developing and implementing their corresponding algorithms using C++ programming language under Linux operating system. We run extensive simulations according to various parameters, and we demonstrate that the Enhanced Dynamic method provides high throughputs regardless of the network configurations.