The popularity of IEEE 802.11 based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) has increased significantly in recent years because of their ability to provide increased mobility, flexibility, ease of use along with reduced cost of installation and maintenance. This has resulted in massive WLAN deployment in geographically limited environments that encompass multiple Overlapping Basic Service Set (OBSS). In this article, we introduce the IEEE 802.11ax, a new standard being developed by the IEEE 802.11 Working Group, which will enable efficient usage of spectrum along with enhanced user experience. We expose advanced technological enhancements proposed to improve the efficiency within high density WLAN networks and explore the key challenges to the upcoming amendment.

Since the conception of the Internet of things (IoT), a large number of promising applications and technologies have been developed, which will change different aspects in our daily life. This paper explores the key characteristics of the forthcoming IEEE 802.11ah specification. This future IEEE 802.11 standard aims to amend the IEEE 802.11 legacy specification to support IoT requirements. We present a thorough evaluation of the foregoing amendment in comparison to the most notable IEEE 802.11 standards. In addition, we expose the capabilities of future IEEE 802.11ah in supporting different IoT applications. Also, we provide a brief overview of the technology contenders that are competing to cover the IoT communications framework. Numerical results are presented showing how the future IEEE 802.11ah specification offers the features required by IoT communications, thus putting forward IEEE 802.11ah as a technology to cater the needs of the Internet of Things paradigm.

The IEEE 802.11n standard allows wireless devices to operate on 40MHz-width channels by doubling their channel width from standard 20MHz channels, a concept called channel bonding. Increasing channel width should increase bandwidth, but it comes at the cost of decreased transmission range and greater susceptibility to interference. However, with the incorporation of MIMO (Multiple-Input MultipleOutput) technology in 802.11n, devices can now exploit the increased transmission rates from wider channels at a reduced sacrifice to signal quality and range. The goal of our work is to understand the characteristics of channel bonding in 802.11n networks and the factors that influence that behavior to ultimately be able to predict behavior so that network performance is maximized. We discuss the impact of channel bonding choices as well as the effects of both cochannel and adjacent channel interference on network performance. We discover that intelligent channel bonding decisions rely not only on a link's signal quality, but also on the strength of neighboring links and their physical rates.

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The explosive growth in the usage of IEEE 802.11 network has resulted in dense deployments in diverse environments. Most recently, the IEEE working group has triggered the IEEE 802.11ax project, which aims to amend the current IEEE 802.11 standard to improve efficiency of dense WLANs. In this paper, we evaluate the Dynamic Sensitivity Control (DSC) Algorithm proposed for IEEE 802.11ax. This algorithm dynamically adjusts the Carrier Sense Threshold (CST) based on the average received signal strength. We show that the aggregate throughput of a dense network utilizing DSC is considerably improved (i.e. up to 20%) when compared with the IEEE 802.11 legacy network.Postprint (author's final draft

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Abstract-Frequency channels are a scarce resource in the ISM bands used by IEEE 802.11 WLANs. Current radio resource management is often limited to a small number of nonoverlapping channels, which leaves only three possible channels in the 2.4GHz band used in IEEE 802.11b/g networks. In this paper we study and quantify the effect of adjacent channel interference, which is caused by transmissions in partially overlapping channels. We propose a model that is able to determine under what circumstances the use of adjacent channels is justified. The model can also be used to assist different radio resource management mechanisms (e.g. transmitted power assignments)

Abstract-The emergence of MIMO antennas and channel bonding in 802.11n wireless networks has resulted in a huge leap in capacity compared with legacy 802.11 systems. This leap, however, adds complexity to selecting the right transmission rate. Not only does the appropriate data rate need to be selected, but also the MIMO transmission technique (e.g., Spatial Diversity or Spatial Multiplexing), the number of streams, and the channel width. Incorporating these features into a rate adaptation (RA) solution requires a new set of rules to accurately evaluate channel conditions and select the appropriate transmission setting with minimal overhead. To address these challenges, we propose ARAMIS (Agile Rate Adaptation for MIMO Systems), a standard-compliant, closed-loop RA solution that jointly adapts rate and bandwidth. ARAMIS adapts transmission rates on a per-packet basis; we believe it is the first 802.11n RA algorithm that simultaneously adapts rate and channel width. We have implemented ARAMIS on Atheros-based devices and deployed it on our 15-node testbed. Our experiments show that ARAMIS accurately adapts to a wide variety of channel conditions with negligible overhead. Furthermore, ARAMIS outperforms existing RA algorithms in 802.11n environments with up to a 10 fold increase in throughput.