Abstract: The introduction of the IEEE 802.11 standard in late 1990s sparked a whole new promising area in wireless communications, allowing computer users to have untethered access to the Internet. Recently, the IEEE 802.11ac amendment for wireless local area networks (WLANs) has been released that achieves very high throughput (VHT) to approximately 6.933 Gbps. Enhancements to the physical and MAC layers are introduced in the IEEE 802.11ac amendment. These enhancements include exploiting wider channel bandwidths, enhancing modulation and coding schemes, using explicit beamforming, and increasing spatial streams along with the breakthrough of multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO). This paper presents a performance analysis in terms of throughput of IEEE 802.11ac. Simulation is conducted to examine different features defined in the 802.11ac amendment. We calculate the aggregate system throughput of several proposed simulation scenarios. Results show that 802.11ac system throughput increases with the enhancement of channel size, modulation schemes, and spatial streams.

Keywords: 802.11ac, modulation schemes, MU-MIMO, performance analysis, spatial streams.