MAC Technology of IEEE 802.11ax: Progress and Tutorial

High-dense deployment scenario is supposed to be the killer scenario of the future wireless networks. The next generation high efficiency wireless local area networks (WLANs) standard - IEEE 802.11ax, which will be released in the year 2019, directly faces to the high-dense deployment scenario. IEEE 802.11ax is one milestone of WLAN standardization. Thus, a series of media access control technologies are introduced in IEEE 802.11ax such as multi-user MAC (MU-MAC) enhancements, spatial reuse (SR) technology, and target wake-up time (TWT) based power saving mechanism. This paper comprehensively surveys the key technologies proposes a tutorial for IEEE 802.11ax. Some valuable insights are presented in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to directly investigate and analyze the latest stable version (Draft 4.0) of IEEE 802.11ax.