Eureka! Institutional Repository

The family of the IEEE 802.11 protocols for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) has simplified the way that billions of users connect to the internet. The philosophy of these networks is based on the continuous research, evolution and implementation of proper technologies, in order to fulfill the increased demands of users either in data rate or Quality of Service (QoS). These demands result in a continuous development of new protocols when the existing ones are not able to fulfill them. During the last years, there is rapid increase of the number of WLANs that have been deployed . A fact that in one hand offers increased flexibility connecting to the backbone network and greater amount of data to the users, on the other creates serious problems with the interference which is provoked by the Overlapped Basic Service Sets (OBSs), resulting in a decrease of their efficiency. This serious performance issue has led to the necessity of developing a new protocol by the IEEE 802.11 family, in order to address it. The works concerning IEEE 802.11ax protocol development began on March 2013 and are expected to finish on 2019. Subject of this M.Sc. thesis is the presentation of new technologies, which the new protocol is expected to adopt and implement, focusing on spatial reuse. Particularly the research until now in the above field will be presented, either from literature or from the protocol Task Group (TG), also thesis proposals will be presented. Afterwards an evaluation of the suggested solutions concerning spatial reuse will be conducted, using MATLAB software. The structure of this M.Sc. thesis is as follows; Chapter 1 includes a brief presentation of the IEEE 802.11 protocols family. In Chapter 2 a presentation of both 802.11ax protocol and new technologies, which are expected to adopt are included. In Chapter 3, a comprehensive presentation of the literature and TG proposals concerning spatial reuse. In Chapter 4 the suggested solutions are presented, Chapter 5 includes the results of the evaluation and finally Chapter 6 presents the conclusions and future work.