Development of 802.11ax-compatible LSI and Performance Evaluation of Uplink OFDMA

The widespread use of wireless LAN (WLAN) in a variety of scenarios has resulted in spectrum scarcity and reduction of data communication speeds for users in dense environments such as airports, malls, stadiums etc. The standardization of next-generation WLAN standard IEEE 802.11ax began in May 2014 with an aim to improve the user-perceived communication speed in dense deployments. For this purpose, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), capable of simultaneous data transmission and reception by multiple users (MU) has been adopted [1]. In this paper, we developed an analog/digital mixed large-scale integration (LSI) [2] compatible with 802.11ax specification to evaluate the system throughput performance of Uplink (UL) OFDMA. We evaluate and validate the throughput characteristics of 802.11ax UL OFDMA using the evaluation board on which this LSI is mounted. The simulation and evaluation results indicate the effectiveness of UL OFDMA over conventional single user (SU) communication scheme. The system throughput was measured using the developed LSI and 802.11ax UL OFDMA was found to be improved by 2.1 times when compared with 802.11ac.