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IEEE 802.11ax-2021 or 802.11ax is an IEEE standard for wireless local-area networks (WLANs) and the successor of 802.11ac. It is marketed as Wi-Fi 6 (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) and Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz) by the Wi-Fi Alliance. It is also known as High Efficiency Wi-Fi, for the overall improvements to Wi-Fi 6 clients under dense environments. It is designed to operate in license-exempt bands between 1 and 7.125 GHz, including the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands already in common use as well as the much wider 6 GHz band (5.925–7.125 GHz in the US). The main goal of this standard is enhancing throughput-per-area[lower-alpha 1] in high-density scenarios, such as corporate offices, shopping malls and dense residential apartments. While the nominal data rate improvement against 802.11ac is only 37%,:qt the overall throughput improvement (over an entire network) is 400% (hence High Efficiency).:qt This also translates to 75% lower latency. The quadruplication of overall throughput is made possible by a higher spectral efficiency. The key feature underpinning 802.11ax is orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), which is equivalent to cellular technology applied into Wi-Fi.:qt Other improvements on spectrum utilization are better power-control methods to avoid interference with neighboring networks, higher order 1024‑QAM, up-link direction added with the down-link of MIMO and MU-MIMO to further increase throughput, as well as dependability improvements of power consumption and security protocols such as Target Wake Time and WPA3. The IEEE 802.11ax-2021 standard was approved in February 9th, 2021.
MCS index[1] |
Modulation type |
Coding rate |
Data rate (in Mbit/s)[2] | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
20 MHz channels | 40 MHz channels | 80 MHz channels | 160 MHz channels | |||||||
1600 ns GI[3] | 800 ns GI | 1600 ns GI | 800 ns GI | 1600 ns GI | 800 ns GI | 1600 ns GI | 800 ns GI | |||
0 | BPSK | 1/2 | 8 | 8.6 | 16 | 17.2 | 34 | 36.0 | 68 | 72 |
1 | QPSK | 1/2 | 16 | 17.2 | 33 | 34.4 | 68 | 72.1 | 136 | 144 |
2 | QPSK | 3/4 | 24 | 25.8 | 49 | 51.6 | 102 | 108.1 | 204 | 216 |
3 | 16-QAM | 1/2 | 33 | 34.4 | 65 | 68.8 | 136 | 144.1 | 272 | 282 |
4 | 16-QAM | 3/4 | 49 | 51.6 | 98 | 103.2 | 204 | 216.2 | 408 | 432 |
5 | 64-QAM | 2/3 | 65 | 68.8 | 130 | 137.6 | 272 | 288.2 | 544 | 576 |
6 | 64-QAM | 3/4 | 73 | 77.4 | 146 | 154.9 | 306 | 324.4 | 613 | 649 |
7 | 64-QAM | 5/6 | 81 | 86.0 | 163 | 172.1 | 340 | 360.3 | 681 | 721 |
8 | 256-QAM | 3/4 | 98 | 103.2 | 195 | 206.5 | 408 | 432.4 | 817 | 865 |
9 | 256-QAM | 5/6 | 108 | 114.7 | 217 | 229.4 | 453 | 480.4 | 907 | 961 |
10 | 1024-QAM | 3/4 | 122 | 129.0 | 244 | 258.1 | 510 | 540.4 | 1021 | 1081 |
11 | 1024-QAM | 5/6 | 135 | 143.4 | 271 | 286.8 | 567 | 600.5 | 1134 | 1201 |
Notes
In the previous amendment of 802.11 (namely 802.11ac), Multi-user MIMO has been introduced, which is a spatial multiplexing technique. MU-MIMO allows the Access Point to form beams towards each Client, while transmitting information simultaneously. By doing so, the interference between Clients is reduced, and the overall throughput is increased, since multiple Clients can receive data at the same time. With 802.11ax, a similar multiplexing is introduced in the frequency domain, namely OFDMA. With this technique, multiple Clients are assigned with different Resource Units in the available spectrum. By doing so, an 80 MHz channel can be split into multiple Resource Units, so that multiple Clients receive different type of data over the same spectrum, simultaneously. In order to have enough subcarriers to support the requirements of OFDMA, four times as many subcarriers are needed than by the 802.11ac standard. In other words, for 20, 40, 80 and 160 MHz channels, there are 64, 128, 256 and 512 subcarriers in the 802.11ac standard, but 256, 512, 1024 and 2048 subcarriers in the 802.11ax standard. Since the available bandwidths have not changed and the number of subcarriers increases by a factor of 4, the subcarrier spacing is reduced by the same factor, which introduces 4 times longer OFDM symbols: for 802.11ac the duration of an OFDM symbol is 3.2 microseconds, and for 802.11ax it is 12.8 microseconds (both without guard intervals).
The 802.11ax amendment will bring several key improvements over 802.11ac. 802.11ax addresses frequency bands between 1 GHz and 6 GHz.[4] Therefore, unlike 802.11ac, 802.11ax will also operate in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band. To meet the goal of supporting dense 802.11 deployments, the following features have been approved.