Feasibility study on the implementation of IEEE 802.11 on cloud-based radio over fibre architecture

This paper investigates the throughput performance of the IEEE 802.11 MAC when the physical layer is implemented remotely on a cloud-based SDR platform. An analytical model which considers a non-zero late ACK arrival probability is proposed to analyse throughput performance. Both conventional DCF and the Block ACK enhancement from current IEEE 802.11 standards are analysed using the proposed model. Results show that the network delay variance significantly degrades the performance of conventional DCF while enabling Block ACK significantly reduces this degradation.