Next-Generation Indoor Wireless Systems: Compatibility and Migration Case Study

The indoor connected environment has witnessed significant research and development attention from industries and academia due to the growing number of smaller smart indoor devices around us. Developing an effective and efficient wireless access standard is one of the challenging tasks to enable the next generation indoor connected environment. The technical characteristics of existing wireless access standards, including IEEE 802.11a, 802.11n, and 802.11ac, are considerably limited for realizing indoor connected environments, particularly with a growing number of smaller intelligent devices. Moreover, their backward compatibility and migration strategies are significant for developing the next-generation wireless access standard for the indoor Internet of Things environment. In this context, this paper presents an indoor environmental experimental study focusing on the backward compatibility and migration-centric performance analysis of existing wireless access standards. Three wireless access standards that operate in the 5 GHz frequency spectrum are evaluated considering the metrics, including throughput, range, efficiency, and backward compatibility in an indoor environment. The experimental results are also compared with the analytical path loss model to observe the attributes for next-generation wireless access between the observed and analytical models. The evaluation can attest to the suitable migration strategy for stable next-generation wireless access development and deployment for an indoor smart Internet of Things environment.