Implementation and Evaluation of a WLAN IEEE 802.11ay Model in Network Simulator ns-3

The IEEE Task Group ay has recently defined new physical and medium access control specifications to design the next-generation 60 GHz wireless standard IEEE 802.11ay. Built upon the predecessor IEEE 802.11ad, IEEE 802.11ay introduces various technological advancements such as Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication, channel bonding/aggregation, and new beamforming techniques to offer unprecedented performance with 100 Gbit/s of throughput and ultra-low latency. Such performance paves the way for new emerging wireless applications such as millimeterwave distribution networks, data center inter-rack connectivity, mobile offloading, augmented reality/virtual reality, and 8K video streaming. Studying and analyzing these new use-cases is of paramount importance and demands high fidelity network-level simulator due to the scarcity and cost of real IEEE 802.11ay test-beds.

In this paper,we present our implementation of the IEEE 802.11ay standard in the network simulator ns-3. Our implementation captures the specifics of IEEE 802.11ay operations such as the 802.11ay frame structure, channel bonding, new beamforming training procedures, quasi-deterministic MIMO channel support, and singleuser MIMO and multi-user MIMO beamforming training. We also validate and demonstrate the performance of the aforementioned techniques by simulations. The code for our simulation model is publicly available.