Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11ac DCF with Hidden Nodes

Recently, the IEEE 802.11 standard based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) have become more popular and are widely deployed. It is anticipated that WLAN will play an important rule in the future wireless communication systems in order to provide several gigabits data rate. IEEE 802.11ac is one of the ongoing WLAN standard aiming to support very high throughput (VHT) with data rate of up to 6 Gbps below the 6 GHz band. In the development of IEEE 802.11ac standard, several new physical layer (PHY) and medium access control layer (MAC) features are taken into consideration, such as employing wider bandwidth in PHY and incrementing the limits of frame aggregation in MAC. However, due to the newly introduced features, some traditional techniques used in previous standards could face some problems. This paper presents a performance analysis of 802.11ac Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) in presence of hidden nodes in overlapping BSS (OBSS) environment. The effectiveness of DCF in IEEE 802.11ac WLAN when using different primary channels and different frequency bandwidth has also been discussed. Our results indicate that the traditional RTS/CTS handshake mechanism faces shortcomings and needs to be modified in order to support the newly defined 802.11ac amendment.