Managing downlink multi-user MIMO transmission using group membership

Advances in digital communications and signal processing have enabled the adaptation of advanced communication techniques in wireless LAN (WLAN) standards. Among those advanced techniques, multiple-input-multipleoutput (MIMO) is now part of the high throughput (HT) WLAN standard, a.k.a. IEEE 802.11n. With the completion of the IEEE 802.11n specification, the IEEE 802.11 working group (WG) is now working on a new amendment to achieve very high throughput (VHT) in the gigabit range.. The move to higher data rates is enabled by introducing wider bandwidth, downlink multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), and higher modulation and coding schemes (MCS). This paper focuses the use of group membership and identifiers for managing downlink transmissions using MU-MIMO. Downlink MU-MIMO allows a WLAN access point to transmit to multiple stations simultaneously. Group Membership and identifiers are used to signal target stations together with their positions and the number of spatial streams intended for each of them in the downlink transmission. A description of the Group ID concept and its application to the VHT specification is discussed here. A method for assigning stations' position to Group IDs is introduced and its performance is examined.