About WiFi 6
Wi-Fi 6 introduces some new technologies to help mitigate the issues that come with putting dozens of Wi-Fi devices on a single network. It lets routers communicate with more devices at once, lets routers send data to multiple devices in the same broadcast, and lets Wi-Fi devices schedule check-ins with the router.
From residential to commercial, what does WiFi 6 mean for businesses?
Businesses rely on WiFi to connect with their employees and also to create new business opportunities through WiFi. However, the current WiFi technology is hardly enough to meet the needs of today’s modern users. In this article, we will explore the next generation WiFi standard, WiFi-6, how it will solve existing network problems for enterprises, and how it will help them create a network based on their needs.
Why should enterprises replace WiFi 6?
WiFi facilities are an essential part of almost every business. The proliferation of mobile devices and the ever-increasing number of applications and services accessed over the network are putting tremendous pressure on all organizations looking to deploy secure and scalable WiFi networks.
At the same time, the demand for WiFi in the enterprise will only increase in the future. By 2020, the number of connected devices could reach 30 billion; by 2025, that number is expected to reach 80 billion.
With many of these connected devices relying on WiFi, the demand for fully scalable, secure, and reliable services is also growing. IDC forecasts that global sales of enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) devices will grow by 5.5 percent over the next five years, reaching $7.5 billion by 2022.
As WiFi has evolved, it has become more than just connectivity. Organizations now rely on WiFi to connect with users (internal and external) for business on a daily basis. WiFi can be used to attract, reward, and impress customers through personalized applications and targeted marketing. WiFi can also be used to interact with users in new ways and create a platform for realizing new business opportunities.
It’s not enough to simply provide a WiFi network to organizations, users, and customers. Network connectivity must be secure and reliable, and scalable to support new applications, devices, and use cases.
Deploying enterprise-class WiFi that meets all of an organization’s needs is difficult, and the fact that WiFi users are mobile users presents coverage challenges. Attenuation from buildings or interference due to the presence of a large number of users in an area can have an impact on the radio frequency (RF) signal.
Security is the most important issue for any organization’s WiFi deployment, yet it is very difficult to fully implement. To address these evolving challenges, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved more than 15 iterations of protocols to govern WiFi over the past 20 years.
The latest protocol, 802.11acWave2, eliminates the gigabit-per-second WiFi traffic barrier and brings advanced capabilities to large enterprise environments. Despite these improvements, many organizations are still finding limitations in the number of channels and devices and capacity support for 802.11acWave2.
These limitations are more prevalent in locations with very high user densities, such as stadiums, conference centers, transportation hubs, and auditoriums. In these places, more and more users rely on WiFi, and they expect fast and reliable connectivity even during peak usage periods.
At the same time, the management of these venues is beginning to realize that WiFi can lead to new business opportunities, from increased customer engagement and satisfaction to marketing promotions and detailed data analysis.
WiFi is also increasingly being used for Internet of Things (IoT) deployments to improve operational efficiency by interconnecting devices. Network operators are using WiFi to divert mobile data, and smart city initiatives are beginning to roll out public WiFi.
In developing countries, WiFi is often easier to set up than mobile networks, resulting in a host of new use cases. However, WiFi products based on previous generations of protocols have struggled to meet the diverse and demanding needs of these new use cases.
WiFi-6 is a vision of the future of WiFi
To address these challenges, a new WiFi protocol has been created, WiFi-6, sometimes referred to as the High-Efficiency Wireless standard, which supports up to four times the throughput of previous standards, and many of the improvements in the WiFi-6 version are designed for high-density areas.
The new protocol offers many benefits
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)
In earlier WiFi, an access point (AP) could only communicate with one device at a time. In large-scale environments, this approach was not feasible. By using OFDMA technology, WiFi-6 WiFi devices can stitch the communication frequencies between APs and devices into a resource unit. Doing so allows the frequencies to be divided into sub-carriers to coordinate traffic and serve more packets from more devices, thereby increasing the capacity of the network.
Uplink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO)
Previous generations of WiFi standards took MU-MIMO into account, but only for downlink traffic. WiFi-6 protocol adds uplink MU-MIMO support to support simultaneous transmission of client data to the AP uplink direction. This is another improvement for high-density environments and is particularly helpful in enhancing the client experience on WiFi networks.
Data Rate
1024 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM)
QAM indicates how data is transmitted in the WiFi protocol. In the WiFi-6 protocol, the QAM method has been scaled up from 256 to 1024, greatly increasing the total throughput of WiFi-6 WiFi.
Power Efficiency
The latest standard allows for coordination of transmission times between devices. This feature reduces the amount of time a device’s RF unit needs to be online, thereby increasing power capacity.
Overlapping Basic Service Set (OBSS) Classification
To support device-intensive environments, a large number of APs need to be placed side-by-side, which increases co-channel interference and reduces network performance. WiFi-6 standard uses OBSS to support color-coding of shared frequencies, which increases network capacity to transmit data to multiple devices simultaneously in congested areas.
About WiFi 6 Technology Solutions
The improvements in WiFi-6 are beneficial for a large number of use cases but are particularly important for dense environments where a large number of connected users and devices exist. The following scenarios would benefit from improvements to the WiFi-6 standard.
Large Public Venues (LPV)
Stadiums and convention centers are common LPVs and are beginning to offer WiFi in order to enhance the fan or audience experience, increase customer interaction, and create value-added services such as showing instant replays on fan devices or allowing audience members to order food from their seats.
Stadiums and convention centers face challenges of scale and density when tens of thousands of users in the stadium and convention center are connected to WiFi at the same time. By leveraging WiFi-6’s advances in OFDMA, 1024QAM, OBSS classification, and faster PHY rates, LPV owners can create new business opportunities by offering enhanced services to their patrons.
Transportation Hubs
Public WiFi is also available at public transportation stations, and like stadiums, transportation hubs can have large crowds trying to connect to the network at the same time. However, these hubs face unique challenges from transient devices that send managed traffic when they are not connected to the WiFi network, causing congestion. WiFi-6’s improvements in OFDMA and BSS classification can address these intensive environment challenges.
IoT and Smart City Deployments
These deployments face a variety of challenges. Sometimes there may be a large number of devices trying to communicate simultaneously, such as in a manufacturing plant.
There are also times when a few devices may be idle and need to communicate with the host once a day. WiFi-6’s power efficiency enables devices to go into deep sleep mode and turn on their transmitters at pre-defined intervals to extend field operation without maintenance.
Education
On college campuses, there are areas with a very high density of WiFi users such as libraries, auditoriums, lecture halls, student activity centers, and venues for graduation and other campus events. Elementary/K-12 education trends (such as video-based learning, 1:1 computing, connected classrooms, and IoT) are beginning to trigger a wireless transmission capacity crisis, which has implications for network reliability.
How can WiFi-6 technology be leveraged?
The WiFi-6 standard lays the foundation for WiFi to support higher concurrent device capacity. Hardware and software features based on the WiFi-6 standard are needed if you want to take advantage of these technical improvements. Enterprises are not deploying standards; they are purchasing products (such as APs, wireless controllers, and management centers) to deploy WiFi.
When evaluating WiFi vendors, enterprises should consider not only the latest standards but also the additional features and functionality enabled by improvements to the standards. By itself, WiFi-6 does not address dynamic channel selection or other multi-access point network optimization such as client load balancing. Simply deploying the WiFi-6 standard will not provide any benefits.
For the enterprise, WiFi has never been more important, and the demand for networks in the enterprise continues to grow. A large number of advances in WiFi standards are supporting new applications. But enterprises that want to take full advantage of these advances also need to use WiFi hardware and software that is optimized based on these new standards.
You may also be interested in the below articles.
