Evaluating 802.11ac features in indoor WLAN: an empirical study of performance and fairness

Abstract

We present a thorough and extensive experimental performance characterization of the achievable data throughput, jitter, and fairness of the IEEE 802.11ac standard for indoor Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) using real testbed deployments and statistical analysis. 802.11ac achieves higher throughput by incorporating wider channels, more spatial streams, and denser modulation compared to the 802.11n standard. Through diverse testbed experiments we use multiple linear regression to gain insights on the influence of individual 802.11ac features and of their combinations on network performance and fairness for various link and interference scenarios. We further show that 802.11ac WLANs with wider channels can be fairer compared to 802.11a/n in dense environments with high interference.