Performance Study of High-Efficiency IEEE 802.11ax WLAN Standard Using NS-3 Simulator

Abstract

The future Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) networks are expected to cater to the high-density use-case scenarios such as airports, residential apartments, outdoor stadiums, etc., where numerous Access Points (APs) are deployed to cover the given geographical area. The IEEE 802.11ax is the current generation WLAN standard designed to cater to such high-density networks. To meet the demands of high-density networks, the 802.11ax standard uses a novel frequency reuse mechanism known as Basic-Service Set (BSS)-Coloring. In this paper, we have studied the impact of the BSS-Coloring feature on the performance of the up-link throughput of 802.11ax WLAN. To this end, we have carried out Network-Simulator (NS)-3-based simulation study. Further, we have simulated a multi-BSS environment and studied the performance of throughput due to variation in the following key WLAN parameters: (i) Modulation & Coding Scheme (MCS) Index, (ii) Channel bandwidth, (iii) Number of antennas, (iv) Access-Categories, and (v) Non-saturated Traffic conditions.