IEEE 802.11ac: A Performance Assessment of Single-User Transmit Beamforming and Multi-User MIMO Transceiver Architectures

In this paper, we first describe and validate an IEEE 802.11ac physical layer simulator. In the following, a comparative performance evaluation, considering the packet error rate as the comparison metric, of different configurations of 802.11ac systems is carried out. Single user systems, assuming transmit beamforming and spatial expansion schemes with linear zero forcing and minimum mean squared error multiple input multiple output detectors, as well as multi-user systems with linear zero forcing channel inversion and block diagonalization precoding schemes are investigated assuming realistic synchronization and channel estimation schemes.