Share the features of Wi-Fi 6 that you don’t know

From simple home blood pressure monitors to corporate device networks and entire utility grids, Wi-Fi® is increasingly being used, even anticipated, in many areas today. Using Wi-Fi, homeowners can save time and energy by securely and reliably controlling smart ovens, electric vehicle charging stations, or sprinkler systems. Building managers can enable remote lighting and air conditioning systems to conserve resources, improve comfort, and reduce expenses. Grid operators can wirelessly detect and resolve issues related to maintenance, power distribution, and security.

In the past, Wi-Fi met performance requirements at a manageable cost; it was ubiquitous, interoperable, and familiar. For example, Wi-Fi infrastructure was common across many sectors, so product designers did not have to worry about creating bridges and adapters to connect their products to the Internet. Another advantage of Wi-Fi was the broad ecosystem of technology providers who continued to improve the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standard and then worked with the Wi-Fi Alliance on interoperability testing to provide ever-expanding capabilities. However, not everyone is aware of new Wi-Fi standards, or understands their importance to the increasingly complex and diverse connectivity network of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Looking at the evolution of Wi-Fi, the current Wi-Fi standard is IEEE 802.11ax, or Wi-Fi 6, which has several little-known features that are optimized for cost-sensitive IoT applications. People know that Wi-Fi supports high-throughput options of Gigabits per second for smartphones and laptops, but Wi-Fi 6 now includes features that start at tens of Mbits per second, enabling new:

Energy Saving Agreement

Range Enhancement

Spectrum Extension

These enable the creation of chip- and module-level products that you can use to easily and affordably add Wi-Fi connectivity to embedded system designs.

The CC3301 SimpleLink companion IC from Texas Instruments (TI) helps implement Wi-Fi 6 in configurations that support 20MHz-wide RF channels as well as integrated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The device is economical, can be easily added to system designs with a single antenna, and supports physical layer throughput of about 86Mbps. This is more than enough for bulk data-oriented devices such as Internet Protocol (IP) security cameras and printers. Not only does it scale easily for sensors and other instruments that may only require a few kilobits per second of throughput, it also has the flexibility to perform fast refreshes (even on small sensors, refresh operations can involve exchanging multiple megabytes of data).

Figure 1: Wi-Fi 6 features supported by TI’s CC3301 SimpleLink companion IC (Source: Wi-Fi Alliance).

TI supports the CC3301 and other products in the SimpleLink Wi-Fi 6 family with software products that scale well for IoT computing resources, including microprocessor (MPU) products running embedded Linux® and microcontroller (MCU) products running FreeRTOS. The family includes products with 2.4GHz radios, dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and tri-band 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz. In addition, some products support BLE for Wi-Fi configuration or use as embedded gateways.

While Wi-Fi 6 is best known for its high throughput capabilities, it has several features that are beneficial to IoT applications in terms of extended spectrum, advanced security, power saving, and latency management. The following table (Figure 2) summarizes some of these features:

Figure 2: Potential Wi-Fi 6 use cases by feature

With the SimpleLink Wi-Fi 6 family of devices, TI is bringing the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 to IoT applications that you can evaluate immediately using TI processor software development kits and TI MCU LaunchPad development kits.