QoS Evaluation of the Future High-Efficiency IEEE 802.11ax WLAN Standard

Nowadays, the development of new wireless protocols and standards are an engineering challenge due to the increased demand of Internet services via wireless access networks. Incoming standards, such as the IEEE 802.11ax, aim to improve the availability and performance of the wireless local area networks (WLAN). Recent works related to the development of the IEEE 802.11ax standard are focused on the description and initial performance evaluations of the expected technical improvements; however, there is no evaluation available regarding the QoS improvements that can be achieved with the new features included in the standard. In this work, we present a qualitative evaluation, as well as a set of laboratory and emulation tests aiming to compare current WLAN networks (IEEE 802.11g/n/ac) with the future IEEE 802.11ax networks. Datasets from real wireless scenarios are collected to evaluate QoS metrics in current IEEE 802.11g networks, and the IEEE 802.11ax standard is evaluated via emulation in NS3 with the injection of the same datasets, considering there are no deployments available with the new standard to date. Results show a significant improvement in terms of effective transfer rate (throughput) and round-trip-time (RTT) for the future WLAN networks, which is in line with the huge potential expected with the introduction of the upcoming high efficiency IEEE 802.11ax standard.