Practical throughput analysis of commercial Wi-Fi devices supporting IEEE 802.11ac Wave2 specification

Abstract

Wireless LAN introduced to replace Ethernet cable has become an essential network interface for Internet connectivity with the tremendous increase of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in recent decades. When it was first introduced in the late 1990s, the network speed was only 2 Mbps. But, with various technologies such as OFDM and MIMO applied, the latest 802.11ac wave2 standard supports up to 6.9 Gbps. However, this is the theoretical capacity when eight data streams are transmitted under the assumption that all environments are optimal. The actual throughput experienced by the user has a large gap from the theoretical network capacity. In this study, we investigate network throughput in various environments by using 802.11ac wave2 capable routers and smartphones and analyze why there is a big difference between the theoretical throughput and actual user throughput.