Modeling of Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11ac Offloading Performance for 1000x Capacity Expansion of LTE-Advanced

This paper studies indoor Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11ac deployment as a capacity expansion solution of LTE-A (Long Term Evolution-Advanced) network to achieve 1000 times higher capacity. Besides increasing the traffic volume by a factor of x1000, we also increase the minimum target user data rate to 10Mbit/s. The objective is to understand the performance and offloading capability of Wi-Fi 802.11ac at 5GHz. For the performance evaluation of Wi-Fi, we propose a novel analytical throughput model that captures both key 802.11ac enhancements and multi-cell interference. We provide a quantitative evaluation of large-scale indoor Wi-Fi 802.11ac deployment in a real urban scenario by extensive simulations. We conclude that deploying indoor Wi-Fi access points in almost every building is essential to carry the x1000 traffic volume and ensure a minimum user data rate of 10Mbit/s.