IEEE 802.11ac: Enhancements for very high throughput WLANs

The IEEE 802.11ac is an emerging very high throughput (VHT) WLAN standard that could achieve PHY data rates of close to 7 Gbps for the 5 GHz band. In this paper, we introduce the key mandatory and optional PHY features, as well as the MAC enhancements of 802.11ac over the existing 802.11n standard in the evolution towards higher data rates. Through numerical analysis and simulations, we compare the MAC performance between 802.11ac and 802.11n over three different frame aggregation mechanisms, viz., aggregate MAC service data unit (A-MSDU), aggregate MAC protocol data unit (A-MPDU), and hybrid A-MSDU/A-MPDU aggregation. Our results indicate that 802.11ac with a configuration of 80MHz and single (two) spatial stream(s) outperforms 802.11n with a configuration of 40 MHz and two spatial streams in terms of maximum throughput by 28% (84%). In addition, we demonstrate that hybrid A-MSDU/A-MPDU aggregation yields the best performance for both 802.11n and 802.11ac devices, and its improvement is a function of the maximum A-MSDU size.