Investigations on Multi-User MIMO Feature in IEEE 802.11ac Networks

This paper studies the multi-user MIMO feature of IEEE 802.11ac networks that serve, along with IEEE 802.11ac nodes, also legacy IEEE 802.11n nodes. For this purpose, we develop a simulator that models the IEEE 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11n networks. Then, using a setup, we first study the tradeoff between the amount of overhead used in channel sounding and the corresponding rate of information, concluding that in this setting, channel sounding with all clients lead to better throughput. Secondly, we observe the negative impact of IEEE 802.11n nodes on the IEEE 802.11ac traffic due to the deafness problem, and analyze the performance of the usage of RTS/CTS handshake and cts2self mechanisms to mitigate this effect. We show that the regular RTS/CTS handshake mitigates the deafness problem to a certain degree. However, the cts2self mechanism achieves a better performance since no airtime is wasted to collisions with the RTS frames.