The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) published a white paper that provides deployment guidelines for Wi-Fi 6 technology by network operators, enterprises and cities.
Globally, dependence upon Wi-Fi continues to grow exponentially, driven by a number of factors:
- The number of Wi-Fi devices in the world – 9 billion – now outnumbers the 7.6 billion people on the planet.
- Global enterprises this year will generate more than 33 billion exabytes of IP traffic. By 2022, that number will grow to more than 63 billion exabytes of IP traffic, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent.
- Wi-Fi is the primary access technology in most broadband households, with 76 percent of US households using Wi-Fi as the primary broadband connection.
The WBA expects that Wi-Fi 6 will mitigate some of the growing pains that Wi-Fi is experiencing, while ensuring that operators, enterprises and vendors meet important service-level agreements (SLAs). As such, the work released today proposes guidelines to ensure SLAs around bandwidth, throughput, latency, traffic prioritization and numerous other factors.
The paper also provides guidelines for RF planning and design, with consideration given to factors like band steering, MU-MIMO and adjusting for high-density deployments that demand increased capacity. Additionally, today’s release addresses ways that Wi-Fi 6 deployments can provide seamless mobility and backward compatibility with previous Wi-Fi generation technology.
Wi-Fi 6 benefits include higher data rates, increased network capacity, improved performance in congested environments, and improved power efficiency:
- Uplink and downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA): increases network efficiency and lowers latency for high demand environments
- Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO): allows more data to be transferred at once and enables an access point to transmit to a larger number of concurrent clients at once
- Transmit beamforming: enables higher data rates at a given range resulting in greater network capacity
- 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation mode (1024-QAM): increases throughput in Wi-Fi devices by encoding more data in the same amount of spectrum
- Target wake time (TWT): significantly improves battery life in Wi-Fi devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices