Performance Comparison of IEEE 802.11be and 802.11ax in Terms of Throughput

IEEE 802.11be, the seventh-generation wireless protocol, will be released soon and will perform better than IEEE 802.11ax, the sixth-generation wireless technology. The performance of competing wireless protocols at the same operating frequency—5 GHz—is reviewed in this study. We use Network Simulator (NS-3) as a simulation tool that offers flexibility, shorter setup time, and makes it easy to experiment for any scenario we need to do. Furthermore, this paper focuses on analyzing and comparing the throughput of the IEEE 802.11be (Extremely High Throughput MCS) (EhtMcs) and 802.11ax (High Efficiency MCS) (HeMcs) protocols with different client counts and specific payload sizes. Spatial flow, channel width, Guard Interval (GI), Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS), and simulation duration are among the other parameters that are set to certain values. Simulation results show that the IEEE 802.11be Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS-13) protocol has better throughput performance than the IEEE 802.11ax Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS-11) with many clients. In the simulation, the access point node is accessed from 2 to 128 clients. Simulation results show that in every situation, IEEE 802.11be performs better than IEEE 802.11ax. Wi-Fi 7 achieves up to 18 percent higher throughput for lower client counts and up to 35 percent higher throughput in scenarios with 64 to 128 clients, demonstrating its enhanced efficiency and reliability for high-density networks.