Performance Comparison of SU- and MU-MIMO in 802.11ax: Delay and Throughput

The most recent Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11ax, supports uplink multiuser (MU) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) with the expectation of increased throughput and reduced access delay, compared with the legacy Wi-Fi. Recent studies on cellular mobile networks, such as 3GPP LTE, have shown that MU-MIMO indeed greatly improves the delay and throughput performance, compared to single user (SU)-MIMO. However, there is no study explicitly comparing the 802.11ax and the legacy Wi-Fi in the uplink delay and throughput perspectives. This paper presents numerical comparison of uplink MU- and SU-MIMO on the delay and throughput performance.