WiFi 6 (802.11ax) basics to know

A new buzz word associated with WiFi is trending. Technology manufacturers of WiFi equipment advertising this newest version and new compatible equipment . It is not too far away from compatible consumer gadgets to hit the market. WiFi 6 is here. Newest member in the WiFi technology family will provide faster and more efficient wireless access networks for rapidly evolving networking world and will be complementing 5G networks in years to come. Cisco predicts there will be 14.6 billion IoT devices connected in the world by 2022. Projection is that there will be 22.2 billion wireless LAN connected devices in total by 2022 ( Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/802706/world-wlan-connected-device/ ).

As this large number of devices are penetrating the world, networks should be ready to provide seamless connectivity with top performance. Demand for high speed wireless networks and reliable performance will be increased rapidly. With this demand growing, a new IEEE standard 802.11ax is introduced, known as WiFi6.

Previous iteration of WiFi standard, 802.11ac provided theoretical speeds, just over 1Gbps. The new iteration 802.11ax is said to provide 10 times faster, closer to 10Gbps theoretical speeds. A few key differences between the new standard and previous standards are introduced in 802.11ax, that makes it faster and more reliable. Minimized conflicts between clients, more simultaneous client connections, lower power consumption for devices and reduced latency are key benefits of WiFi6. Improvements in WiFi 6 are achieved due to a few key differences in some technology aspects compared to the previous versions.

What is Different ?

• MU-MIMO — Multi User Multiple Input & Multiple Output technique used to provide efficient transmission for clients. In WiFi 6 MIMO supports downlink and uplink both, where multiple clients can receive communication from AP (downlink) simultaneously and multiple clients can send to AP (uplink) simultaneously. This increases faster transmission for clients. For high density environments having multiple clients streaming and transmitting at the same time increases efficiency, reliability and speeds of the wireless network.

• OFDMA — Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access used to divide a Wi-Fi channel into sub channels to increase capacity, allowing multiple devices to communicate at the same time in a given Wi-Fi channel. In previous iterations Wi-Fi used OFDM which serves clients in a single channel on a first come first serve basis. Clients had to wait for their turn. OFDMA divides a channel into sub channels called Resource Units (RU), servicing multiple clients simultaneously. This is an access point based mechanism where APs allocate RUs accordingly. A common analogy used to describe this feature is a scenario of delivery trucks. Imagine multiple trucks delivering packages to the same house (OFDM — previous WiFi iterations) and same truck delivering multiple packages to the same house (OFDMA — WiFi 6).
• TWT — Target Wake Time allows Access Points to negotiate with wireless clients a time interval for transmission. Clients only need to be awake and listen to a specific beacon transmission negotiated with the AP. Beacons sent from the AP will trigger the client to become awake and start transmitting and receiving. This will increase battery life of devices, specifically devices with small batteries and capacity related to IoT. Given that TWT provides the ability for client scheduling, it will reduce the contention in WiFi medium and increase reliability in high density environments.

• BSS Coloring — Basis Service Set Coloring helps avoiding clashes between clients using the same frequency. BSS coloring marks same frequency for different clients with a number,and helps sharing frequency to be used simultaneously. This will eliminate clients interfering with each other and in turn increases reliability and performance of WiFi networks. Also benefits for QoS implementations.
• 1024-QAM — 1024 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation is a modulation technique of the wireless waves, where it packs more bits into a signal. Previous modulation technique of 256-QAM included 8 bits of data into the signal. With the new 1024-QAM it has increased by 25%, including 10 bits per signal. Having more data packed into a signal increases the speeds and higher throughput.

All of the techniques mentioned make WiFi 6 standard to make wireless networks more reliable, efficient and faster. Future will be where WiFi becoming the standard access method of the networks. It has certainly evolved from “a nice thing to have” to “a must have” component of a network. Applications, user needs and devices becoming more reliant on higher throughput, capacity and faster access. Involving technology standards like WiFi 6 will assist deploying high quality wireless network of the future and compliment technologies like 5G.