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

TL;DR

This paper compares uplink scheduling strategies and throughput performance of IEEE 802.11ax against IEEE 802.11ac, demonstrating significant improvements in throughput and access delay with 802.11ax across various scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates new uplink scheduling mechanisms for IEEE 802.11ax, highlighting their superior throughput performance over IEEE 802.11ac in multiple configurations.

Findings

IEEE 802.11ax outperforms 802.11ac by up to 85% in reliable channels.

In MU-MIMO mode, 802.11ax exceeds 802.11ac throughput by over 270%.

Advantages 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 Uplink (UL) traffic and users as compared with his predecessor IEEE 802.11ac, en- abling consistent and reliable streams of data (average throughput) per station. In this paper we explore several new IEEE 802.11ax UL scheduling mechanisms and compare between the maximum throughputs of unidirectional UDP Multi Users (MU) triadic. The evaluation is conducted based on Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Acceess (OFDMA) transmission multiplexing format in IEEE 802.11ax vs. the CSMA/CA MAC in 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 conducted as a function of the Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) in use. In IEEE 802.11ax we consider two new flavors of ac- knowledgment operation settings, where the maximum acknowledgment windows are 64 or 256 respectively. In SU scenario IEEE 802.11ax throughputs outperform IEEE 802.11ac by about 64% and 85% in reliable and unreliable channels respectively. In MU-MIMO scenario IEEE 802.11ax throughputs outperform IEEE 802.11ac by up to 263% and 270% 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.