Scheduling strategies and throughput optimization for the Downlink for IEEE 802.11ax and IEEE 802.11ac based networks

TL;DR

This paper compares the throughput and delay performance of IEEE 802.11ax and 802.11ac standards, highlighting significant improvements in 802.11ax across various scenarios and channel conditions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the upper bounds on downlink throughput for IEEE 802.11ax versus 802.11ac, considering MU-MIMO and OFDMA in different station scenarios.

Findings

IEEE 802.11ax outperforms 802.11ac in throughput by up to 74% in reliable channels.

In unreliable channels, 802.11ax's throughput exceeds 802.11ac by up to 103%.

Access delay benefits of 802.11ax increase with the number of stations.

Abstract

The new IEEE 802.11 standard, IEEE 802.11ax, has the challenging goal of serving more users compared to its predecessor IEEE 802.11ac, enabling consistent and reliable streams of data (average throughput) per station. In this paper we explore some of the IEEE 802.11ax new mechanisms and compare between the upper bounds on the throughputs of the Downlink unidirectional UDP Multi Users (MU) triadic based on Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) transmission multiplexing format in IEEE 802.11ax vs. IEEE 802.11ac in the Single User (SU) and MU modes for 1, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 stations scenario in reliable and unreliable channels. The comparison is made as a function of the Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) in use. In IEEE 802.11ax we consider two flavors of acknowledgment operation settings where the maximum acknowledgment windows are 64 or 256 respectively. In SU scenario IEEE 802.11ax upper bounds on the throughputs outperform IEEE 802.11ac by about 52% and 74% in reliable and unreliable channels respectively. In MU-MIMO scenario IEEE 802.11ax upper bounds on the throughputs outperform IEEE 802.11ac by about 59% and 103% in reliable and unreliable channels respectively. Also, as the number of stations increases, the advantage of IEEE 802.11ax in terms of the access delay also increases.