Measurement-Based Study of the Performance of IEEE 802.11ac in an Indoor Environment

We present results from a measurement-based study of the performance of the emerging IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard in an indoor environment. The measurements were conducted in a typical office building, and show that for small distances IEEE 802.11ac offers significantly improved performance compared to IEEE 802.11n. However, these performance improvements were also found to be quite sensitive to channel conditions, with the achieved data rates rapidly declining as the distance between the transmitter and the receiver is increased. We also studied the coexistence properties of IEEE 802.11ac through measurements, observing that adjacent channel interference from legacy Wi-Fi devices can have a severe performance impact. For co-channel interference, the medium access control mechanism of IEEE 802.11ac allows it to share the channel effectively with other Wi-Fi devices.