Comprehensive Study on MIMO-related Interference Management in WLANs

With the explosive growth of smart devices and mobile data traffic, the wireless local area network (WLAN) faces persistent challenge on increasing the network throughput to meet the customer’s requirement. Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) is a promising technology to improve the network capacity and has been adopted to WLANs in current IEEE 802.11 standards. Interference management for MIMO-based WLANs has become a hot topic in recent years due to its huge potential in improving the network performance. This paper surveys the MIMO-related interference management mechanisms from both the single collision domain and multiple collision domain scenarios. It first provides some background information about the evolution of IEEE 802.11 standards, then introduces the MIMO-related physical layer and MAC layer mechanisms as preliminaries. After this, it investigates the current advances on MIMO-related interference management in both the single collision domain and multiple collision domain through the physical layer and MAC layer mechanism design. It also provides discussions on important findings and research challenges, and finally gives potential future research directions.