Recently, the WiFi Alliance announced that it will participate in CES 2024, the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, January 9-12 next year, while confirming the foundation based on IEEE 80211BE's Wi-Fi Certified 7 certification standard will be officially launched by the end of the first quarter of 2024. What are the advantages of Wi-Fi 7 as an "upgrade"?
It is understood that the goal of Wi-Fi 7 is to further improve the data throughput rate of WLAN networks and provide low-latency access guarantees. To achieve this, the entire protocol has been changed at both the PHY and MAC layers. Compared with the Wi-Fi 6 protocol, the main technical changes brought about by the Wi-Fi 7 protocol are as follows:
Supports maximum 320MHz bandwidth:To address the low QoS that existing Wi-Fi experiences when running emerging applications such as VR AR, Wi-Fi 7 will continue to introduce the 6GHz band and add new bandwidth modes, including continuous 240MHz, non-continuous 160+80MHz, continuous 320 MHz, and non-continuous 160+160MHz, providing twice the throughput of Wi-Fi Certified 6.
Support for multi-ru mechanism:Wi-Fi 7 defines a mechanism that allows multiple RU to be assigned to a single user to solve the problem that each user in Wi-Fi 6 can only send or receive frames on the specific RUs they are assigned to, thereby increasing the flexibility of spectrum resource scheduling.
Introducing a higher order of 4096-QAM modulation techniques:Wi-Fi 7 will introduce "4096-QAM", which will allow the modulation symbol to carry 12bits. Wi-Fi 7's "4096-QAM" can get a 20% rate boost compared to Wi-Fi 6's "1024-QAM" with the same encoding.
Introducing the multi-link mechanism:The working group defines the technologies related to multilink aggregation, mainly including MAC architecture of enhanced multilink aggregation, multilink channel access and multilink transmission.
Supports collaborative scheduling between multiple APsThe collaborative scheduling of multiple APs in Wi-Fi 7, including inter-cell coordination planning in the time and frequency domains, inter-cell interference coordination, and distributed MIMO, can effectively reduce inter-AP interference and greatly improve the utilization of air interface resources.
In summary, Wi-Fi 7 introduces a number of new technologies based on the Wi-Fi 6 standard, and the main benefits include:Higher throughput, improved support for deterministic latency, increased efficiency even in dense networks, greater robustness and reliability, lower power consumption.
At present, the Wi-Fi 7 devices that have been launched on the market are actually designed and manufactured based on the "Wi-Fi 7 Draft", and only devices that have obtained "Wi-Fi Certified 7 certification" are considered real Wi-Fi 7 devices. It is reported that this year, many flagship hands and routers of the Android camp have supported Wi-Fi 7Judging from the previous test results of Xiaomi, **1GB movies only cost 29 seconds.
Of course, these benefits of Wi-Fi 7 will be more beneficial to emerging applications such as: streaming, voice conferencing, wireless gaming, real-time collaboration, cloud edge computing, industrial IoT, immersive AR VR, and interactive telemedicine.
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