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Pasternack Blog
WiFi Ceiling Antenna
The next generation of Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11be, or Wi-Fi 7 standard, is slated to be officially released in early 2024. However, there are already a host of devices on the market that are touting Wi-Fi 7 capabilities, as early drafts of the standard have been regularly released as the amendment has been developed. This means there are already devices on the market operating in the new frequency range with extended capabilities beyond Wi-Fi 6e. There are still a variety of new features being released and solidified, and this next several months will see the final version and specification of these features. Many of which are new to Wi-Fi and will be instrumental in advancing Wi-Fi from a home, business, and enterprise internet delivery system to a highly reliable, low-latency, and deterministic competitor to cellular network standards, such as proprietary industrial/enterprise 4G LTE and 5G.
Multi-Link Operation (MLO)
MLO is a new Wi-Fi feature that is being developed with the goal of ensuring lower communication latency, greater reliability, and enhanced throughput. MLO enables these enhancements by facilitating simultaneous communication over more than one available channel in the available spectrum between two Wi-Fi devices. There are a few possible variations of MLO, some of them are high band simultaneous (HBS) multi-link, enhanced multi-link single radio (EMLSR), and enhanced multi-link multi-radio (EMLMR). These combinations present the potential use of multiple links and radios between two Wi-Fi devices to provide an optimized communication link that should help to improve reliability, throughput, and to keep latencies low, possibly in the single-digit millisecond level, for some applications.
PHY Enhancements
There are several new physical layer (PHY) enhancements planned for Wi-Fi 7. The major enhancements are extended channel bandwidths in the 6 GHz band to 320 MHz from 160 MHz with Wi-Fi 6e. Moreover, a deeper modulation level to 4096-QAM and 16×16 multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) with 16 spatial streams results in Wi-Fi 7 having a maximum theoretical throughput of 46 Gbps. With orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and multi-resource unit (MRU) capability, Wi-Fi 7 should exhibit higher throughput, enhanced interference immunity, and better spectrum usage than previous Wi-Fi generations.
Another key new feature for Wi-Fi 7 is preamble puncturing. Preamble puncturing, or simply puncturing, enables the use of overlapping channel blocks that may not be fully exploited in congested environments.
Multi-AP Coordination
Wi-Fi 7 may also even offer advanced access point (AP) coordination, called multi-AP coordination. These features may enable both MAC and PHY access enhancements in multi-AP environments that could benefit from real-time/active coordination among APs, such as large venues, factories/facilities, public transit hubs, etc.
Enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) Management
Many of the Wi-Fi 7 QoS management enhancements are designed to enable determinism, lower maximum latencies, and boost reliability in Wi-Fi networks.
