Paper Info
Title
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2014.6857103
Networking
Keywords
Field
DocType
radio links,18-nodes 802.11ac testbed,ieee 802.11ac,power consumption,next generation wlan,radiofrequency interference,next generation networks,spatial streams,medium access,heterogeneous channel,denser modulation,wireless channels,mimo communication,quadrature amplitude modulation,mimo spatial streams,interference characterization,wireless lan,energy efficiency,throughput,interference
Quadrature amplitude modulation,Efficient energy use,MIMO,Testbed,Electronic engineering,Modulation,Interference (wave propagation),Throughput,Engineering,Spatial multiplexing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
19
0.94
10
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yunze Zeng11519.45
Parth H. Pathak242930.98
Prasant Mohapatra34344304.46