WNL Head Evgeny Khorov presents a Tutorial on Wi-Fi at IEEE PIMRC 2019

Head of Wireless Networks Lab Evgeny Khorov has presented tutorial entitled «Wi-Fi in the 2020s» at the 30th 2019 Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications which was held in Istanbul, Turkey. The talk opened a conference tutorial session on September 8, 2019.

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, Wi-Fi is the most popular Internet access technology which serves over half of global traffic. Emerging applications and scenarios bring new challenges related to extremely high data rates, ultra-low latencies and support of a high number of power-limited clients. To save and even to increase its share on the market, Wi-Fi continues to evolve. The next edition of the IEEE 802.11 standard – that is expected in the early 2020s – will include mechanisms to support massive and heterogeneous Internet of Things applications, advanced techniques for multigigabit communications, more flexible QoS provisioning, power management, etc. In 5 years, Wi-Fi technology will provide 40 Gbps connectivity in traditional bands and over 250 Gbps in millimeter bands. Moreover, along with radio frequencies, Wi-Fi will soon implement light communications. Along with the wider bands, the enabler of higher data rates is Massive MIMO. Apart from that, much effort is put to improve spectral efficiency with sophisticated spatial reuse and advanced multiple access techniques. Many ongoing activities are also related to significant reducing power consumption in Wi-Fi networks to make it suitable for battery-powered devices. The most recent ideas are related to providing low-latency communications for AR/VR scenarios as well as V2X communications.

In the tutorial, Evgeny Khorov has considered how promising approaches are implemented in the future Wi-Fi standard, what and why is left beyond the scope of the standard, and how the research community can contribute to maximizing user experience in Wi-Fi networks. The audience discussed the peculiarities of resource allocation in 11ax networks and show how they modify the classical schedulers for wireless networks. They considered how the vision on the interference problem is changed over time and how to manage carrier sensing in dense (or sparse) environments. Also, Evgeny Khorov showed how non-orthogonal channel access can be implemented in future Wi-Fi devices in a backward-compatible way. Finally, the participants discussed what else can be optimized in terms of power consumption or Internet of Thighs, and clarified other open issues related to the standard amendments that are currently under development, namely 11ax – 11be, which would come to the mass market in the early 2020s.

The IEEE PIMRC 2019 is a top-ranked scientific conference which brings together researchers, academics, industry representatives to exchange the latest ideas in advanced aspects of telecommunications.

Evgeny Khorov is the head of the Wireless Networks Lab at IITP RAS, vice-chair of the Problems of Information Transmission and Data Analysis Department at MIPT, and the Head of the Telecommunication Systems Lab, Higher School of Economics, Russia. He has led dozens of national and international projects sponsored by academia funds and industry. Being a voting member of IEEE 802.11, he has contributed to the 802.11ax standard as well as to the Real-Time Applications TIG. He has authored over 90 papers. His main research interests are related to 5G and beyond wireless systems, next-generation Wi-Fi, the Internet of Things, protocol design, and QoS-aware cross-layer optimization. He was a recipient of the Russian Government Award in Science, several Best Papers Awards and Scopus Award Russia 2018. In 2015, 2017 and 2018 Huawei RRC awarded him as the Best Cooperation Project Leader. He gives tutorials and participates in panels at significant IEEE events. He chairs TPC of the IEEE Globecom 2018 CA5GS Workshop and IEEE BlackSeaCom 2019. He also serves as an Editor for Ad Hoc Networks.

Wireless Networks Lab is a ‘Megagrant’ lab established in 2017 around the project on Cloudified Wireless Networks for 5G and beyond, led by Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz. The team regularly reports at leading IEEE conferences, runs industrial projects and contributes to standardization of wireless networks.