English

Improving DL-MU-MIMO Performance in IEEE 802.11ac Networks through Decoupled Scheduling

Networking and Internet Architecture 2017-04-28 v2

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11ac standard introduces new downlink multi-user MIMO (DL-MU-MIMO) transmissions to up to four users in order to increase spatial reuse in wireless local area networks (WLANs). We argue that even better WLAN per- formance can be achieved by slightly modifying the DL-MU-MIMO scheduling. To this end we propose a new queuing mechanism based on the decoupling of EDCA and DL-MU-MIMO scheduling (DEMS) to avoid head-of-line blocking. We show that DEMS outperforms traditional 802.11ac scheduling based on first in, first out transmission queues. The improvement is shown in terms throughput achieved with: (a) more efficient channel usage, (b) increased probability of transmission of high priority traffic, and (c) decreased competition between frames destined to distinct users.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.06167,
  title  = {Improving DL-MU-MIMO Performance in IEEE 802.11ac Networks through Decoupled Scheduling},
  author = {Katarzyna Kosek-Szott},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.06167},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Manuscript accepted for publication in Springer Wireless Networks

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:22:41.596Z