Bandwidth analysis of IEEE 802.11AC protocol on ARM platforms: Potential influencing factors

This paper measures the actual bandwidth of wireless devices on ARM platforms supporting the IEEE 802.11ac standard as the data transmission protocol under the condition that there is no occlusion in the transmission path. The influences of the transmission distance, the data transmission duration, and the driving devices on the transmission terminal on the data transmission rate are investigated in several experiments. The results indicate that the maximum bandwidth can reach 251.63 Mbps when ARM platforms are used on the transmission terminal and the transmission distance and duration do not influence the data transmission rate significantly (p-values are 0.3 and 0.07, respectively). We conclude that the actual data transmission rate of devices supporting the IEEE 802.11ac protocol may not reach the nominal level (~ 1Gbps), and the actual data transmission rate depends on the hardware configuration and other set up parameters.