Throughput comparison of IEEE 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11n in an indoor environment with interference

Abstract

IEEE 802.11ac is an emerging standard that operates in 5GHz frequency band and provides high data rate as compared to IEEE 802.11n. In this paper we carry out experiments in a real indoor environment and quantify the gain in average throughput provided by IEEE 802.11ac compared to IEEE 802.11n in the presence of interference caused by other IEEE 802.11n sources. The experiments are performed for both Line of Sight (LoS) and Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) conditions. We note that IEEE 802.11n (2.4GHz) provides the worst average throughput due to the highly congested 2.4GHz frequency band in our experimental environment. We find that IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) with 40MHz channel width provides a gain of 36% in average throughput compared to 20MHz channel width at a distance of 20m from the wireless router in LoS conditions. Our experimental results reveal that IEEE 802.11ac achieves 42% better average throughput when compared to the IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) at a distance of 5m in LoS conditions. Similarly, IEEE 802.11ac provides 55% improvement over IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) at a distance of 15m in NLoS conditions. We conclude that IEEE 802.11ac can effectively handle interference caused by other IEEE 802.11n (5GHz) sources and provides higher throughput than IEEE 802.11n for both LoS and NLoS conditions.