The Wi-Fi Alliance announces the official launch of the Wi-Fi 6 certification program. Wifi 6 brings new features and should offer improved range and faster speeds. Devices with the WiFi 6 certificate meet the requirements set by the alliance.
The announcement marks the official start of the certification of WiFi 6 devices, but in fact it is a formal step as devices with support for the WiFi standard have already appeared. More devices with support for WiFi 6 will gradually be released this year. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+ are the first smartphones to be Wi-Fi Certified 6, for example. In addition, several manufacturers advertise with WiFi 6 support. For example, during the recent iPhone keynote, Apple stated that the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro models are compatible with WiFi 6 and various WiFi 6 routers have already appeared.
Wifi 6 works over 802.11ax radios. These new radios are the sixth generation of 802.11, so the Wi-Fi Alliance calls the new standard Wi-Fi 6, as was apparent from the new Wi-Fi naming scheme last year. According to alliance estimates, Wi-Fi 6 is about thirty percent faster than Wi-Fi 5. The early manufacturers of 802.11ax routers claim a total theoretical maximum bandwidth of 11Gbit/s, but in practice this bandwidth will be much lower.
Some features of Wi-Fi 6. Image by Wi-Fi Alliance
Wifi 6 uses orthogonal frequency division multiple access, also known as ofdma. This technique takes a Wi-Fi channel and splits it into several, smaller signals. These signals are called resource units, or RUs. These RUs allow a router to communicate with several devices simultaneously by assigning a resource unit to each device.
This allows several small data packets to be handled simultaneously, eliminating the need for users to wait for each other. A large part of the data traffic on a network consists of small packets, which means that ofdma must ensure a considerably lower network latency. In addition, RUs offer flexible bandwidth. For example, a device that streams 4k video is allocated more bandwidth than a phone that only uses the Twitter app.
Ofdma works together with another feature of WiFi 6, mu-mimo. This technique is also known as multi-user multiple input multiple output. Mu-mimo also makes it possible to communicate with several devices at the same time, using beamforming. Wi-Fi 6’s predecessor, Wi-Fi 5 or 802.11ac, already had this technology, but the mu-mimo support has been upgraded. Previously, only downlinks could be distributed over four different streams. With WiFi 6, this number is increased to eight streams, and both uplink and downlink streams are supported. Mu-mimo is especially effective at low and medium distances, where ofdma works at all distances.
Beamforming with WiFi 5 explained in a simplified way. Image by Netgear
Also new in WiFi 6 is target wake time. twt allows an ax router to communicate with smartphones and iot devices about when and how often they need to wake up to receive data. As a result, devices will not be constantly looking for data streams, which should lead to lower consumption and improved battery life. In addition, data transmissions will be more efficient, which should lead to more usable bandwidth for other devices on the network.
Furthermore, 802.11ax routers should provide increased range and responsiveness on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels, respectively. The 802.11ax routers use 160MHz channels at 5GHz, which theoretically gives faster speeds. Wifi 6 also uses 1024-qam. This means that 1024 combinations of phase and amplitude can be sent over the same frequency, which is equivalent to 10 bits of data. This additionally optimizes bandwidth usage. Wifi 5 supported 256-qam.