802.11ax designed to boost Wi-Fi in congested deployment scenarios
The next enhancement to the IEEE Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax, is poised to hit both enterprise and consumer markets as new product offerings, like Ruckus’ access points and Charter’s new home Wi-Fi router. Both the router and the access point, as well as other compatible devices use chipsets from Qualcomm.
802.11ax can support multi-gigabit speeds and is geared toward dense, congested deployment scenarios. The Wi-Fi enhancement features 8×8 multi-user multiple-input, multiple-out (MU-MIMO), OFDMA, which is borrowed from LTE, and an uplink resource scheduler meant to manage resource utilization and improve spectral efficiency.
Adlane Fellah, CEO of Wi-Fi-focused analyst firm Maraverdis, described ax has “targeting an increase in real user data rates of up to 30%, along with a four-fold reduction in latency. It also promises to deliver up to four times more overall data in the same spectrum as 11ac…The technology will wait until 2019 to gain scale.”
Charter said it is the first domestic broadband company to make available a 802.11ax router, called Spectrum. EVP of Engineering and Information Technology Jim Blackley said the new routers unleash “the full potential of Charter’s fiber-rich network, creating a better in-home and entertainment experience and further enabling next generation technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and advanced IoT-enabled applications.”
Last month Ruckus, an Arris company, said it would begin shipping 802.11ax access points this quarter. Dennis Huang, director of product marketing at Ruckus, said 802.11ax is special. Past iterations of Wi-Fi followed a “contention-based resource allocation protocol. With ax we’ve moved much more toward deterministic Wi-FI.”
So what does that mean for an end-user? Huang pointed to trial activities in a stadium and in train stations in Japan. He said when there are around 1,000 access points and tens of thousands of clients, the Wi-Fi network is constantly being probed regardless of whether the probe is coming from someone who intends on connecting to the network. In the train station example, there are some people waiting in the station wanting to connect to Wi-Fi. But there are many more people walking in and out of the station simply probing the network but not connecting. “That scenario causes a lot of problems for Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has to effectively respond to all these beacons and probe requests. This transient time management does a bunch of things behind the scenes but one of which is almost ignoring these transient clients that don’t have the intention of connecting to Wi-Fi so that availability can be provided to the devices that want to connect.”
