Study of Spatial Reuse in IEEE 802.11ax Networks over Propagation Models

Abstract

The paper studies the spatial reuse in IEEE 802.11ax networks over propagation models in ns3. The propagation models used in the study include the Friis model, the Nakagami model, and the combination of the two models. The results show that not all access points in an area benefit from the spatial reuse, and some even lose throughput. These results introduce the question of how to justify the spatial reuse for those access points who lose throughput, although the total throughput of the access points in the area benefits from the spatial reuse in general. The results also show that the total throughput gains heavily depend on the physical environment of the networks as the environment determines the signal propagation in the networks. The results show that an environment of significant attenuation plus multipath fading offers significant throughput gains for the access points as a whole. Our main contributions in the paper are the results of the ns3 simulations which were not found in the literature.