Performance comparison of wireless protocol IEEE 802.11ax vs 802.11ac

Abstract

The sixth generation of wireless protocol IEEE 802.11ax has been launched and offers better performance than the previous fifth-generation wireless protocol IEEE 802.11ac. This paper reviews the performance of both wireless protocols in the same operating frequency of 5 GHz. We used Network Simulator NS-3 as a simulation tool that offers flexibility, lesser time to set up and ease the experiment to any scenarios we need to perform. Furthermore, this paper focuses on analyzing and comparing the throughput of protocol IEEE 802.11ax Mcs-11 and 802.11ac Mcs-9 with a certain payload size and a various number of clients. The other parameters are set at certain values, such as a spatial stream, channel width, modulation and coding scheme, guard interval time and simulation time. The simulation result shows that the IEEE protocol 802.11ax Mcs-11 has better throughput performance than IEEE 802.11ac Mcs-9 with a large number of clients. In the simulation, a node of access point was accessed of 512 clients, IEEE 802.11ax Mcs-11 have more long delay response time than IEEE 802.11ac Mcs-9 at the beginning for a few milliseconds, but after 0.5 ms IEEE 802.11ax shown a stable and bigger throughput value than IEEE 802.11ac that its shown decrease.