A Survey on High Efficiency Wireless Local Area Networks: Next Generation WiFi

Abstract

The emerging paradigm of the Internet of Everything, along with the increasing demand of Internet services everywhere, results in a remarkable and continuous growth of the global Internet traffic. As a cost-effective Internet access solution, WiFi networks currently generate a major portion of the global Internet traffic. Furthermore, the number of WiFi public hotspots worldwide is expected to increase by more than sevenfold by 2018. To face this huge increase in the number of densely deployed WiFi networks, and the massive amount of data to be supported by these networks in indoor and outdoor environments, it is necessary to improve the current WiFi standard and define specifications for high efficiency wireless local area networks (HEWs). This paper presents potential techniques that can be applied for HEWs, in order to achieve the required performance in dense HEW deployment scenarios, as expected in the near future. The HEW solutions under consideration includes physical layer techniques, medium access control layer strategies, spatial frequency reuse schemes, and power saving mechanisms. To accurately assess a newly proposed HEW scheme, we discuss suitable evaluation methodologies, by defining simulation scenarios that represent future HEW usage models, performance metrics that reflect HEW user experience, traffic models for dominant HEW applications, and channel models for indoor and outdoor HEW deployments. Finally, we highlight open issues for future HEW research and development.