Comparative Performance Analysis of the IEEE802.11ax and 802.11ac MIMOLink for WLANs

Abstract

The escalating demand for swift and dependable wireless internet access has spurred the development of various protocols within 802.11 WLANs. Among them, the 802.11ac protocols have gained widespread acceptance over the past few years, offering enhanced data transfer rates compared to the 802.11n standard. However, the persistent congestion of wireless IoT devices, particularly in densely populated areas, remains a significant challenge. To tackle this issue, IEEE 802.11 has advanced IEEE 802.11ax as the successor to 802.11ac, introducing critical enhancements at the PHY/MAC layers to improve throughput in dense scenarios. Additionally, modelling and simulating these protocols are vital for WLAN researchers and designers to anticipate link characteristics effectively, fostering high-performance WLAN design. The need for such tools led to the creation of diverse network simulation programs, and NS-2 is widely accepted as an open-source program that has achieved remarkable success in research. In this paper, we focus on various connection properties of 802.11ax WLANs through NS-3 simulations, including MCSs, bonded channels, GI, data encoding, antennas, data rates, link distance, Tx/Rx power, gain, and payload size. We also compare their performance against 802.11ac, which demonstrates that NS-3 accurately supports most 802.11ax capabilities and outperforms 802.11ac in various scenarios.