Wi-Fi alliance has announced its advanced version among the generations – WiFi6 certification for device manufacturers. With the latest generation of wireless broadband transmission technology, the 6th generation Wi-Fi will offer much higher data rate for more crowded environments.
Apart from high speed network, WiFi6 has performance improvements in terms of efficiency, security and network scalability.
Specification of WiFi 6
How does Wi-Fi 6 works?
MU – MIMO Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output
MIMO is a concept of increasing number of antennas (at transmitter side and receiver end) in order to achieve higher data rate. MU-MIMO allows simultaneous data transmission of multiple users at the same time. This technology offers higher data rate without compromising any latency in the network.
OFDMA – Orthogonal Frequency Multiple Division Access
OFDMA is an advanced modulation scheme used in LTE and 5G network which allows multiple channel transmission simultaneously in both directions. A subset of available frequency spectrum is allowed to each user under the network at a particular time. Same bandwidth of spectrum can be used for downlink and uplink by efficiently scheduling the time slot (either for transmission or receiving at a given time).
More Spatial Streams for 5 GHz band
Spatial streaming is a multiplexing technique used in wireless transmission to increase the data rate by transmitting independent and separate data packets known as streams. Each transmitting antennas can be reused or multiplexed for increased efficiency. Wi-Fi 6 can support up to 8 spatial streams for 5GHz band and offers date rate of few Gigahertz (up to 10 GBPS).
Beamforming
Conventional wireless transmitters (early generations) transmit signals at every direction of its surroundings. It will affect the network capacity, utilizes more power and produce noise to the environment.
Beamforming is an advanced network technology used in latest wireless networks to efficiently target each device (and its precise location) and send signals to direction of that particular device. With the use of MIMO technology, beamforming will increase network capacity by targeted use of antennas (antennas in other directions can be assigned for more devices).
Devices under beamforming often compared to as a bright light which follows a stage performer. When the performer moves from one location to other of the stage, the light follows. Similarly, antenna will transmit signals to the direction of the user equipment (UE).
Target Wake Time
Transmssion to devices can be scheduled and efficiently manage the power usage of devices. Radio transmission will be stopped and put the device into sleep mode for a short interval of time and activates the wake mode to start transmission. This could significantly improve the power management of battery operated devices.
Typical sleep wake intervals can range from few hundred milliseconds up to few hours in some IoT devices which doesn’t require frequency transmission.
Efficient Power management
High density enviornements like airports or shopping malls will have more access points. Huge number of transmitting devices causes distortion and it could affect the quality of service.
Each devices under a particular access points will be using efficient power management technique to avoid noise to the surroundings. Devices closer to the access points will reduce the transmitting power to sufficient level to communicate to connected access point.
Key features of WiFi 6
- Ultra fast network with higher bandwidth and MIMO antenna modules
- Low latency service offers much lower response time
- 1024-QAM modulation schemes for huge amount of data handling
- High security with WPA3
- Efficient utilization of available channel bandwidth
- Noise reductions of adjacent transmitting routers by smart power management
- More users under one network without compromising speed
- Extended battery life for devices
- Efficient resource management using complex algorithms
- Scalable network
- Flexibility
- 5G offloading for indoor applications
- Support for huge number of IoT devices
As one of the most popular technology today, Wi-Fi has helped us to connect billions of devices to internet with convenience. Wi-Fi also has evolved over time to support increasing demand for high speed data and huge number of devices. An advanced version of Wi-Fi 6 known as WiFi6-E which uses extended frequency bands above of 6 GHz spectrum.
Please let me know what your thoughts/comments are on this: