IEEE WLANs in 5 vs 6 GHz: A Comparative Study
Hao Yin, Sumit Roy, Sian Jin · 2022
US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has adopted new rules to open the 6 GHz bands for unlicensed access as the increasing demand for wireless networks. The new ruling limits operation by a Power Spectral Density (PSD) limit in 6 GHz bands that differs from the total average power independent of the channel bandwidth in 5 GHz bands. The new power rules impact the transmission range, and the unequal power of the Access Points (AP) and stations (STA) also impact the system performance in wireless local area networks (WLANs). In this paper, we analyze the throughput of Wi-Fi distributed coordination function (DCF) with two physical (PHY) layer considerations, including the different power rules in 5 and 6 GHz bands as well as the unequal power setup among APs and STAs. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to analyze the cross-layer performance of Wi-Fi in 6 GHz bands and unequal power setups. Using ns-3 simulations, we validate our throughput analysis results and show the related insights.