Characterizing the performance of beamforming WiFi access points

Recently beamforming WiFi access points (APs) have been commercially available from multiple vendors. The promise of beamforming APs is the enhanced range and data transmission rate, albeit at a premium price for the AP which can be an order of magnitude more expensive than regular omnidirectional APs. In this work, through live measurements, we study the throughput performance of beamforming APs and compare it with that of regular omnidirectional APs. We consider two systems with multiple WiFi clients and: 1) a single expensive beamforming AP, and 2) multiple low-cost omnidirectional APs. We find that while in some situations the beamforming AP outperforms multiple regular APs when downloading data, in other scenarios typical of home and office use, multiple regular APs results in higher throughput and service quality. Moreover, multiple regular APs always outperforms the beamforming AP when uploading data.