IEEE 802.11ac MU-MIMO Wireless LAN Cells with Legacy Clients

We provide an empirical evaluation of an IEEE 802.11ac Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) cell with Multiple User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) technology. We conducted our experiments on a testbed comprising consumer equipment under different office scenarios using 40MHz and 80MHz channels. This is the first performance study of MU-MIMO with 802.11ac in an operational scenario using a commercial access point. We find that, for clients that do not support MU-MIMO, operating in a cell that has MU-MIMO enabled may result in reduced performance.