1. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Brian Hart, Cisco SystemsSlide 1 Cropping VHT Basic/Supported MCS Sets from Below Date: 2012-03-06

2. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Situation (1/3) Very challenging environment –500 people each with devices in close proximity, starting with 20-40% retries in reality Native client algorithms are not optimized for this case Clients mostly stick to the doorway AP, stick at 2.4 GHz, rate adapt to inefficient low MCSs Infrastructure has to load balance across APs, band-steer 5 GHz-capable devices to 5 GHz, control cell size by a) constraining TX powers, b) cropped- from-below Basic sets, and c) cropped- from-below-but-less-so Supported sets, change WMM/EDCA parameters, etc –Infrastructure needs every tool in the toolkit We don’t want to go backwards! Slide 2 500 great 802.11 customers

3. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Situation (2/3) In the past, Basic Rate Set/Basic MCS Set has been used in two ways: –“My hardware can’t go higher than this data rate” –“To improve spectral efficiency (and reduce sticky clients), don’t send data/mgmt frames within the BSS below this rate” 11a/b/g/n defined a bit mask so they enable both ways trivially. In 11ac, our encoding only enables the first way Slide 3

4. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Situation (3/3) Too many clients are optimized for the home/isolated hotspot Once associated to an AP, clients stick to it, even when there is a much closer AP –Data rates are much slower than they need to be –Spectral efficiency and spatial reuse is markedly diminished So we control cell size by deleting lowest 11a/11n rates –Beacons at are sent at 12/24 Mbps –Clients must roam when they can’t decode the beacon Slide 4

5. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Problem But, just deleting the lowest 11a/11n MCSs still leaves spectral efficiency at the mercy of the client We see clients not receiving acks due to collisions rate-adapt down from 64QAM, 16QAM, QPSK to BPSK –Even though only 10 ft from the AP –Even though these lower rates lengthen the PPDU and actually increase collision rates! We see clients always sending BAs at the lowest PHY rate, impacting BSS throughput –We need the ability to crop the basic and AP’s supported rate sets from below as a workaround for these clients Slide 5 Distracted by the beauty of the 11ac encoding, we made an oversight in 11acD2.0

6. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Proposal (1/3) Define 3 bits to delete VHT MCSs from below in the VHT Basic MCS Set and VHT Supported MCS Set VHT Operation element is (often thought of as) extensible (see P65L10) so append an optional octet containing these 3 bits Slide 6 2 or 3 B16 B18B19 B23 VHT Basic Rx Lowest Supported Data Rate Reserved 35 In this optional octet, use these 3 bits to indicate compactly which VHT MCSs are deleted from the VHT Basic MCS Set Also delete them from the RX MCS Map (i.e. VHT Supported MCS Set)

7. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Proposal (2/3) What not to worry about: “Mandatory” means mandatory and this has higher precedence than “Basic”. –Basic and Supported rates just define the required and desired rates within the BSS Even if we remove a rate from the VHT Basic MCS Set, a) an AP must still be able to receive frames from outside the BSS (such as a Probe Request sent in a VHT PPDU), and b) a STA ultimately must still be able to receive control frames sent at a non-basic mandatory rate: e.g. –9.7.6.5.3 Control response frame MCS computation … If none of the above conditions is true, the CandidateMCSSet is the combination of the BSSBasicMCSSet and the VHTBSSBasicMCSSet parameters. If the combined BSSBasicMCSSet parameter is empty, the CandidateMCSSet shall consist of —the set of mandatory HT PHY MCSs, if the STA eliciting the response is an HT STA that is not a VHT STA; —the set of mandatory HT and VHT PHY MCSs, if the STA eliciting the response is an VHT STA. Deleting rates from “Basic” just means we don’t want data/mgmt frames sent within the BSS at those deleted rates – but the PHY RX HW will still receive them (note: upper layers could discard them) Slide 7

8. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Proposal (3/3) We could disable by spectral efficiency, under the assumption that an overlapping BSS can use the unused medium time*medium bandwidth –Least true for 20 MHz (since secondary20 is a disfavored primary channel), BUT rates in 11n can only enabled/disabled by spectral efficiency (i.e. no BW granularity); but sadly we’re pretty-much stuck with this (see backup slide) Yet, we don’t want to push devices towards 20 or 40 MHz just for range, and thereby using more medium time, so we delete the lower-bandwidth PHY rates more aggressively This is our preferred proposal Slide 8 PHY rates that are excluded (identified by NSS, MCS and BW) Encoding (of Rx Lowest Supported Data Rate) NSS/MCS/Mbps assuming short GI and 20 MHz NSS/MCS/Data rate assuming short GI and 40 MHz NSS/MCS/Data rate assuming short GI and 80 MHz NSS/MCS/Data rate assuming short GI and 160 MHz 0--- - 1: 0 plus …1/0/7.21/0/15.0- - 2: 0 to 1 plus …1/1/14.41/1/30.01/0/32.51/0/65 2/0/14.42/0/30.0 3: 0 to 2 plus …1/2/21.71/2/45.0- - 3/0/21.73/0/45.0- - 4: 0 to 3 plus …1/3/28.91/3/60.01/1/65.01/1/130 2/1/28.92/1/60.02/0/65.02/0/130 4/0/28.94/0/60.0 5-7: Reserved--- -

9. doc.:IEEE 802.11-12/0293r0 Submission Mar. 2012 Backup Slide 10.39.1 Basic VHT BSS functionality A VHT STA sets the Rx MCS Bitmask of the Supported MCS Set field of its HT Capabilities element according to the setting of the Rx MCS Map subfield of the VHT Supported MCS Set field of its VHT Capabilities element as follows: for each subfield Max MCS For n SS, 1<=n<=4, of the Rx MCS Map field with(#2098) a value other than 3 (no support for that number of spatial streams), the STA shall indicate support for MCSs 8(n-1) through 8(n-1)+7 in the Rx MCS Bitmask, where n(#2043) is the number of spatial streams. Slide 9