A first look at 802.11ac in action: Energy efficiency and interference characterization

Abstract

This paper is first of its kind in presenting a detailed characterization of IEEE 802.11ac using real experiments. 802.11ac is the latest WLAN standard that is rapidly being adapted due to its potential to deliver very high throughput. The throughput increase in 802.11ac can be attributed to three factors -larger channel width (80/160 MHz), support for denser modulation (256 QAM) and increased number of spatial streams for MIMO. We provide an experiment evaluation of these factors and their impact using a 18-nodes 802.11ac testbed. Our findings provide numerous insights on benefits and challenges associated with using 802.11ac in practice.Since utilization of larger channel width is one of the most significant changes in 802.11ac, we focus our study on understanding its impact on energy efficiency and interference. Using experiments, we show that utilizing larger channel width is in general less energy efficient due to its higher power consumption in idle listening mode. Increasing the number of MIMO spatial streams is comparatively more energy efficient for achieving the same percentage increase in throughput. We also show that 802.11ac link witnesses severe unfairness issues when it coexists with legacy 802.11. We provide a detailed analysis to show how medium access in heterogeneous channel width environment leads to the unfairness issues. We believe that these and many other findings presented in this work will help in understanding and resolving various performance issues of next generation WLANs.

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“…The paper concludes that using legacy RTS/CTS handshake mechanism has some shortcomings that need to be addressed to cope with the new 802.11ac features. In [11], a performance analysis of energy efficiency and interference in 802.11ac is presented. The authors proclaim that more energy is consumed when utilizing wider channel bandwidths, whereas the addition of more spatial streams is energy efficient.…”