Uni-MUMAC: a unified down/up-link MU-MIMO MAC protocol for IEEE 802.11ac WLANs

Due to the dominance of the downlink traffic in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), a large number of previous research efforts have been put to enhance the downlink transmission, namely, from the Access Point (AP) to stations (STAs). The downlink Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) technique, supported by the latest IEEE amendment-802.11ac, is considered as one of the key enhancements leading WLANs to the Gigabit era. However, as cloud uploading services, Peer-to-Peer and telepresence applications get popular, the need for higher uplink capacity becomes inevitable. In this paper, a unified down/up-link Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol called Uni-MUMAC is proposed to enhance the performance of IEEE 802.11ac WLANs by exploring the multi-user spatial multiplexing technique. Specifically, in the downlink, we implement an IEEE 802.11ac-compliant MU-MIMO transmission scheme to allow the AP to simultaneously send frames to a group of STAs. In the uplink, we extend the traditional one round channel access contention to two rounds, which coordinate multiple STAs to transmit frames to the AP simultaneously. 2-nd round Contention Window $$(CW_{\rm 2nd})$$(CW2nd), a parameter that makes the length of the 2-nd contention round elastic according to the traffic condition, is introduced. Uni-MUMAC is evaluated through simulations in saturated and non-saturated conditions when both downlink and uplink traffic are present in the system. We also propose an analytic saturation model to validate the simulation results. By properly setting $$CW_{\rm 2nd}$$CW2nd and other parameters, Uni-MUMAC is compared to a prominent multi-user transmission scheme in the literature. The results exhibit that Uni-MUMAC not only performs well in the downlink-dominant scenario, but it is also able to balance both the downlink and uplink throughput in the emerging uplink bandwidth-hungry scenario.