A Channel Bonding Based QoS-Aware OFDMA MAC Protocol for the Next Generation WLAN

The IEEE 802.11ax, which was approved by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) in March, 2014 as the next generation Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) standard, has rigorous requirements in terms of high throughput and Quality of Service (QoS) support in the dense user scenario. To achieve high throughput by utilizing the wide bandwidth while decreasing the collision probability among stations, a Channel Bonding based QoS-aware Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) MAC protocol (CBQO) is proposed in this paper. Based on the combination of channel bonding and OFDMA, the capability of reducing collision probability in the dense user scenario is enhanced compared to the traditional OFDMA based MAC protocol, since the amount of subchannels is improved several times by the introduction of the channel bonding, and the wide channel provided by channel bonding are efficiently allocated among stations according to their QoS requirements, as the OFDMA provides a flexible and fine-grained management of the channel resource. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the IEEE 802.11ac MAC protocol in terms of both throughput and delay of video traffic.