We propose an AP-based handoff management scheme in which each AP having multiple interfaces communicates with MSs by turns, prohibiting from using the same channel as neighboring APs at the same time to avoid interference. In the proposed scheme, APs support handoff management to accomplish MS-unaware handoff. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can not only achieve low handoff delay, but enhance throughput performance.

Three synchronization issues, i.e., phase, frequency, and symbol time, have to be properly controlled to achieve distributed beamforming gain. In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, frequency offset in cooperating signals is more important than other synchronization issues since it results in SNR degradation as well as inter-carrier interference (ICI). In this paper, the impact of frequency offset in distributed beamforming is analyzed for OFDM systems. ICI resulting from frequency offset between cooperating signals is also investigated and approximated. Performance degradation due to frequency offset is shown with various numbers of cooperating signals and offset values. We show that frequency offset between cooperating signals is critical in OFDM systems since it leads to interference from the other subcarriers as well as power loss in the desired signal.

IEEE 802.11ac uses DL MU-MIMO and channelization for very high throughput. We propose a new algorithm for adaptive channelization in DL MU-MIMO WLANs. The proposed scheme can enhance the throughput efficiency for DL MU-MIMO transmission by adaptively applying the channelization scheme according to data size and MCS. Moreover, our proposal can reduce the overhead due to the exchange of control frames for DL MU-MIMO transmission in WLANs. A performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is superior to IEEE 802.11ac WLAN.

We propose three operation modes, namely, DCF uplink, Downlink, and CTS uplink modes to solve the unfairness problem between uplink and downlink as well as improve the performance of delay and throughput. The proposed scheme only requires modifying AP's functionalities without any changes of STAs, and is fully backward compatible to the legacy DCF. Its analytical result is validated against simulation and performance evaluation shows the proposed scheme is superior to the traditional IEEE 802.11 WLAN.