Survey and Performance Evaluation of the Upcoming Next Generation WLANs Standard - IEEE 802.11ax

With the ever-increasing demand for wireless traffic and quality of services (QoS), wireless local area networks (WLANs) have developed into one of the most dominant wireless networks that fully influence human life. As the most widely used WLANs standard, IEEE 802.11 will release the upcoming next generation WLANs standard amendment: IEEE 802.11ax. Thus, this article briefly surveys the key technologies of IEEE 802.11ax. Furthermore, performance requirements of IEEE 802.11ax are evaluated via a proposed systems and link-level integrated simulation platform (SLISP). Simulations results confirm that IEEE 802.11ax significantly improves the user experience in high-density deployment, while successfully achieves the average per user throughput requirement in project authorization request (PAR) of IEEE 802.11ax by four times compared to the legacy IEEE 802.11. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first work to thoroughly and deeply evaluate the compliance of the performance requirements of IEEE 802.11ax.