How much do you know about the advantages of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E?

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How much do you know about the advantages of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E? [Copy link]

What are the advantages of Wi-Fi 6 and 6E? It may not be easy to explain these advantages at once, so let's first see how Qorvo summarizes their advantages.

Since the introduction of the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard in 1997, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) has published 20 different 802.11 specifications as of the date of this blog post. In 2018, to simplify how these specifications deliver features and benefits, the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced a generational naming scheme, starting with Wi-Fi 4 for 802.11n and ending with Wi-Fi 7 (in development) for 802.11be. The latest generation, Wi-Fi 6, includes the recently ratified 6 GHz band (i.e., Wi-Fi 6E). As shown in Figure 1, Wi-Fi 6, 6E, and 7 all support the 6 GHz to 7 GHz frequency band range.

Figure 1: Wi-Fi 6, 6E, and 7 frequency bands

Wi-Fi 6 (and 6E) improves upon Wi-Fi 5. These improvements enable higher capacity, better signal reliability, and faster speeds. Key features/benefits of Wi-Fi 6 include:

• Uplink MIMO —Wi-Fi 5 supports multi-user MIMO only in downlink mode. Wi-Fi 6 includes uplink, so multiple users can upload and download data simultaneously.

• Wider Modulation — Wi-Fi 6 with 1024 QAM modulation uses a 10-bit modulation scheme (compared to the 8-bit 256 QAM modulation in Wi-Fi 5), enabling higher throughput and increasing the transmission capacity per symbol by 25%.

• Higher capacity and efficiency — Wi-Fi 6 uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) instead of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in Wi-Fi 5, which enables FDD to replace TDD and also enables resource unit allocation within a specific channel. Subcarrier spacing is reduced to 78.125 kHz (25% of Wi-Fi 5 spacing), and symbols are 4 times longer than Wi-Fi 5. All of these changes combined mean that the system is more efficient, capable of uploading or downloading multiple packets simultaneously, rather than transmitting only one packet at a time.

• 基于调度的工作— 在 Wi-Fi 6 中，接入点决定设备何时工作，因而能够更加高效地处理客户端。资源调度还能显著减少休眠期间的能耗，从而延长客户端的电池续航时间。

• Multi-band — Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 4 operate only in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum ranges; Wi-Fi 6E supports the recently opened 6 GHz spectrum (denoted Wi-Fi 6E) in addition to the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.

Only the advantages are excerpted here. Of course, there are other technical introductions in the original article . Interested friends can click in to read more. Wi-Fi 6 (and 6E) is another upgrade of Wi-Fi. In addition to the advantages given above, let's discuss whether they have other advantages.

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• Multi-band — Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 4 operate only in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum ranges; Wi-Fi 6E supports the recently opened 6 GHz spectrum (denoted Wi-Fi 6E) in addition to the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.