In recent years WiFi 6-enabled devices have started to appear on the market, and when buying a product for wireless networks, it is important to know if the product supports the latest WiFi 6. So what exactly is WiFi 6?
WiFi 6 (Wi-Fi 6), also known as 802.11ax, is the latest generation of the Wi-Fi industry standard following Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). Prior to the release of Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi standards were identified by version numbers from 802.11b to 802.11ac. As the Wi-Fi standard evolved, the Wi-Fi Alliance chose to rename Wi-Fi using numeric serial numbers in order to make it easy for Wi-Fi users and device manufacturers to understand the Wi-Fi standard.
The Wi-Fi 6 standard introduces new technologies such as OFDMA, uplink/downlink MU-MIMO, BSS Coloring, TWT, and more, resulting in leaps and bounds in performance, a four-fold increase in bandwidth and concurrent users compared to Wi-Fi 5, and lower latency and more energy efficiency.
Wi-Fi 6 was designed to handle high-density wireless access and high-capacity wireless services, such as outdoor large public places, high-density venues, indoor high-density wireless offices, electronic classrooms and other scenarios.
In these scenarios, the client devices accessing the Wi-Fi network will show a huge growth, in addition, the also increasing voice and video traffic also brings adjustments to the Wi-Fi network.
As we all know, 4K video streaming (bandwidth requirement 50Mbps/person), voice streaming (time delay less than 30ms), VR streaming (bandwidth requirement 75Mbps/person, time delay less than 15ms) are very sensitive to bandwidth and time delay, and if the network congestion or retransmission causes transmission delay, it will have a big impact on user experience.
The existing Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) can also provide large bandwidth capability, but as the access density continues to rise, the throughput performance hits a bottleneck. Wi-Fi 6, on the other hand, makes leaps and bounds in performance by introducing new technologies such as OFDMA and uplink/downlink MU-MIMO, with a 4x increase in bandwidth and concurrent users compared to Wi-Fi 5, and lower latency.
4 Features of WiFi 6
1. Large bandwidth
Each past generation of the Wi-Fi standard has been dedicated to increasing the rate. After more than 20 years of development, Wi-Fi 6 has reached a theoretical maximum rate of 9.6Gbps at 160MHz channel width, which is nearly 900 times higher than 802.11b.
In addition to the higher-order 1024-QAM coding method, the Wi-Fi 6 rate increase is also due to the increased number of subcarriers, spatial streams, and Symbol transmission time (single single terminal) from 3.2μs to 12.8μs in Wi-Fi 5 compared to Wi-Fi 5.
2. High concurrency
Wi-Fi 6 introduces multi-user technologies such as OFDMA and uplink MU-MIMO to further improve spectrum utilization, enabling Wi-Fi 6 to increase the number of concurrent users by four times compared to Wi-Fi 5.
3. Low Latency
In low latency scenarios, such as VR/AR-interactive operation simulation, panoramic live streaming, interactive games, immersive meetings, HD wireless screen casting, etc., the 30ms latency of Wi-Fi 5 can no longer meet the demand, while Wi-Fi 6 effectively reduces conflicts and improves spectrum utilization through OFDMA, and the spatial multiplexing technology BSS Coloring reduces co-channel interference, bringing the latency down to 20ms. The delay is reduced to 20ms.
4. Energy saving
With the widespread use of IoT devices, Wi-Fi 6 focuses on the power consumption of the terminal in addition to improving the terminal rate. Wi-Fi 6 uses TWT technology to wake up the terminal Wi-Fi on demand, and 20MHz-Only technology to further reduce the power consumption of the terminal.
