Practical retrospective of 5-year evolution of the IEEE 802.11 client device capabilities

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11 standard evolution lasts for 23 years since its initial adoption 1997. During this period of time several major and minor amendments has been made to this standard. The main of them that define new physical and MAC layers are: IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11n, IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ax. In order to provide standard development, almost every amendment included backward compatibility mechanisms. But the other side of such compatibility is the fact that MAC layer of modern WLANs is sometimes overburdened by protection mechanisms included and cannot be as efficient as it had been designed to be. With the adoption of the latest standard amendment IEEE 802.11ax in 2020 the task of throughput estimation in cell with different client mix has now become more complex. In order to provide this problem with good parameter values and in order to estimate when the new standard support will become massive, we have made a review of different WLANs. The paper provides the analysis of IEEE 802.11 amendments and frequency band support in different practical scenarios.