Wi-Fi 8: Next Standard AIMS for Ultra High Reliability

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Wi-Fi 8 Feature

Instead of even more top speed, Wi-Fi 8 promises above all reliable connections: The upcoming IEEE 802.11bn standard is intended to deliver data packets safely to their destination even in overcrowded networks.

Wi-Fi 8 New standard Speed Test and Features

So far, every WLAN generation has been defined by higher nominal speeds. With Wi-Fi 8, however, the industry is changing its focus: under the slogan "Ultra High Reliability" (UHR), latency, packet loss and range are to be improved by around 25 percent each, without increasing the physical maximum rate of 23 Gbit / s.

This course correction follows the need for modern applications from cloud gaming to industrial automation, where stable delivery times are more important than record values in laboratory environments, as Qualcomm - one of the contributors to the new standard - writes in a new outlook.

Technical basics: what remains, what changes

Although Wi-Fi 8 continues to build on 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands, as well as 4096 QAM and 320 MHz channels, the standard brings several new mechanisms into play:

• Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR) reduces interference signals by allowing adjacent access points (AP) to dynamically adjust their transmission power to each other.
• Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF) bundles the radiant energy of several APs onto individual devices, which increases throughput and range.
• Dynamic Sub-Channel Operation (DSO) allocates only as much spectrum to a client as it can actually use, thus saving bandwidth for other devices.

The draft also provides for finer modulation coding schemes (MCS). Due to smaller gradations, the data rate should collapse less abruptly if the radio conditions deteriorate.

The upcoming Wi-Fi 8 standard is not intended to increase the speed of wireless connections, but to make them significantly more stable and therefore more reliable.

At the heart of all innovations is multi-AP coordination. Unlike today's mesh systems, which mainly make routing decisions, in the future Wi-Fi 8 nodes will also be allowed to tune physical access to the medium (c-TDMA) or even orchestrate simultaneous transmissions with reduced performance.

The IEEE timeline provides for the final adoption of the specification for 2028; however, the first draft devices could appear earlier in pilot projects. In view of the long service life of routers, an upgrade is only recommended anyway if your own network already suffers from latency problems today or many IoT devices are sparking in parallel.