Introducing IEEE 802.11ac into existing WLAN deployment scenarios

In mature wireless LAN (WLAN) deployments, we show that introducing 802.11ac could have little benefit compared to existing 802.11n deployments. Using a testbed with common characteristics for a WLAN deployment, we compare throughput for 802.11ac and 802.11n (in both 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands). We find that 802.11ac has lower throughput than for 802.11n for our testbed configuration. We also provide an evaluation of energy usage for 802.11ac and 802.11n.