By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
The era of exclusive focus on speeds and feeds may be gradually coming to a close as the next iteration of Wi-Fi (today called IEEE 802.11bn and in the future to be christened Wi-Fi 8) will be focusing on features for Ultra High Reliability. A new white paper by MediaTek Filogic maps out where Wi-Fi 8 is headed including its proposed new functionality and associated significant benefits. Access the new white paper here.
The world of Wi-Fi never stands still and work on the next Wi-Fi standard is already underway in earnest. The first products supporting the new standard – eventually to be named Wi-Fi 8 by the Wi-Fi Alliance – are expected to be released towards the end of 2027. Meanwhile work on refining the future Wi-Fi 8 feature set is focusing on enabling reliable performance in everyday environments, MediaTek says.
The target is now to improve consistency and performance to make it easier for links to reach higher real rates as opposed to boosting the theoretical PHY rate itself. Two important new features within the category of multi-AP coordination are Co-SR (Coordinated Spatial Reuse) and Co-BF (Coordinated Beamforming). MediaTek’s testing shows throughput improvements of up to 25% (for Co-SR) and as much as 50% (for Co-BF) in the case of mesh networks, the company says.
MediaTek is also proposing to add new data rates meaning introducing finer intervals between MCS levels so that the system can accurately match the data transmission rate to a given SNR. This can enhance transmission rates by up to 30%, MediaTek says. Other improvements including Dynamic Sub-channel Operation (DSO), which could improve transmission rates up to a whopping 80% under specific heavy traffic conditions, the company says.
For all the details click on the graphic below or here to access your copy of the new paper.
/Claus.