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Wi-Fi 6 brings a new era of connectivity for Wi-Fi
®
networks
Wi-Fi 6, based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard, provides the capabilities required to turn once unimaginable
initiatives into practical solutions. The era of Wi-Fi 6 officially began with the launch of the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6
™
certification program by Wi-Fi Alliance
®
, continuing the Wi-Fi
®
tradition of interoperability regardless of vendor,
backward compatibility with legacy devices, and the latest in security protections. Wi-Fi 6 is the latest generation of
Wi-Fi and addresses the opportunities and challenges of today and tomorrow. Chief among these are high
bandwidth, low latency applications and highly congested environments utilizing multiple wireless local area
network (WLAN) technologies. The addition of enhanced security protocols and energy efficient features makes
Wi-Fi 6 a key technology to meet the evolving applications and demands on WLAN networks today.
The feature set for Wi-Fi 6 has been extensively reviewed in various industry publications. Those discussed in this
paper include the following key features implemented in Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 (Figure 1):
• Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA): Subdivides a channel into smaller frequency
allocations to increase network efficiency and lower latency for both uplink and downlink traffic; ideal for
dense and Internet of Things (IoT) environments
• Downlink multi-user multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO): Increases user access and capacity
using different spatial streams; allows more downlink data to be transferred simultaneously on the same
channel, enabling several high bandwidth applications to run concurrently
• Target wake time (TWT): Establishes scheduled sleep and wake times for longer device battery life,
providing network determinism through improved network efficiency; benefits all Wi-Fi 6 devices and
excellent for IoT
Other enhancements, such as 1024-QAM, BSS coloring, beamforming, and eight spatial streams contribute to
enabling Wi-Fi 6 to accommodate extensive uses at home and in the enterprise, including uses targeted by 5G in
the coming years. The advantages of Wi-Fi 6 in such instances relate to the ubiquity of Wi-Fi networks, ease of
deployment, and the use of unlicensed spectrum.
While prior Wi-Fi generations have successfully focused on data rates, the goals for Wi-Fi 6 are grounded in
increasing overall network capacity and throughput. Wi-Fi 6 presents faster speeds compared to prior versions,
supporting up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps), and has been engineered to more efficiently use spectrum
resources to enable good performance in even the most demanding Wi-Fi environments. Wi-Fi 6 advancements
enable Wi-Fi networks to handle many more devices performing a wide variety of tasks and provide a better user
experience in high bandwidth applications—all while increasing power efficiency for Wi-Fi 6 devices connected to
Wi-Fi 6 networks.
