Wifi 6 technology (802.11ax/High-Efficiency Wireless) is the latest version of Wi-Fi technology and brings with it the promise of increased speed, low latency, improved network efficiency, and advanced traffic management.
Moreover, Wi-Fi 6 is less prone to interference, requires lower power, and has improved spectral efficiency.
Features and Technology of Wifi 6
- Bandwidth – Wi-Fi 6 uses 1024-QAM to provide a signal packed with more data, giving more efficiency and a 160 MHz Channel to provide a wider channel bandwidth, making Wifi technology faster.
- Capacity – Wi-Fi 6 uses 8×8 uplink/downlink, MU-MIMO, OFDMA to provide up to 4 times larger capacity, and is able to handle more devices simultaneously. MU-MIMO increases capacity, higher speeds per user and is ideal for high bandwidth applications. OFDMA allows one transmission to deliver data to multiple devices at once.
- Reliability – Basic Service Set Coloring or BSS Coloring, is used to improve reliability in very dense environments. The technique prioritizes or colors traffic, and effectively shuts out, and ignores, traffic on the same frequencies that is likely communicating on another network.
- Power Efficiency – Target Wake Time (TWT) allows devices to negotiate when and how often they should wake up to send or receive data, increasing device sleep time and substantially improving battery life for mobile and IoT devices.
The table below shows the comparison of various 802.11 standards in terms of release year, frequency band, bandwidth, modulation, and data rate –
|
Release year |
Standard | Frequency band | Bandwidth | Modulation | Max Data Rate |
|
1997 |
802.11 | 2.4 Ghz | 20 Mhz | QPSK | 2 Mbps |
|
1999 |
802.11b | 2.4 Ghz | 20 Mhz | QPSK | 11 Mbps |
| 1999 | 802.11a | 5 Ghz | 20 Mhz | 64 QAM |
54 Mbps |
|
2003 |
802.11g | 2.4 Ghz | 20 Mhz | 64 QAM | 54 Mbps |
| 2009 | 802.11n | 2.4, 5 Ghz | 20 Mhz | 64 QAM |
600 Mbps |
| 2013 | 802.11ac | 5 Ghz | 20, 40,80, 160 Mhz | 256 QAM | 6.9 Gbps |
| 2019 | 802.11 ax | 2.4 , 5 Ghz | 20, 40,80, 160 Mhz | 1024 QAM |
9.6 Gbps |
Wifi 6 technology is playing a critical role in helping technology of Wi-Fi evolve into a deterministic wireless technology that significantly increases aggregated network throughput to address high-density venues and beyond.
The future generation of Wi-Fi technology is called Wi-Fi 6E (extended version of Wi-Fi 6) which has already been unlicensed in some countries like USA, UK, South Korea as this will bring a quantum change in the way Wi-Fi will work.
Authored By Mr. Anind Gupta
