Wireless Networks Lab Publishes a Survey on Candidate Features of Wi-Fi 7

 

The paper “Current Status and Directions of IEEE 802.11be, the Future Wi-Fi 7” by WNL members Evgeny Khorov, Ilya Levitsky, and Ian F. Akyildiz has been accepted for publication in IEEE Access.

The survey gives a detailed description of the activity of IEEE 802.11be Task Group. The main goal of the group is to develop a new amendment to the Wi-Fi standard that will increase the throughput to more than 40 Gbps. The 802.11be amendment does not simply scale 11ax with doubled bandwidth and the increased number of spatial streams but also supports real-time applications. In addition to the ones above, they include native multi-link operation, channel sounding optimization that opens the door for massive MIMO, advanced PHY and MAC techniques, the cooperation of various access points. Finally, 11be introduces revolutionary changes, which will form a basement for further Wi-Fi evolution.

Although the development process is at its early phase, the analysis of the discussion in the 802.11 Working Group gives insights into the main innovations of 11be. After studying hundreds of proposals for the new technology, WNL members have identified the main directions of development and documented them in the paper. It focuses on the open problems that can be solved by the researchers who want to contribute to the development of 802.11be. WNL will also solve some of these problems as part of a recently won RSF grant.

The paper is published in IEEE Access, a multidisciplinary open-access journal. It is an award-winning, all-electronic archival journal, continuously presenting the results of original research or development across all of IEEE’s fields of interest. The scope of this journal comprises applications-oriented and interdisciplinary articles, technical articles, as well as reviews, and surveys. IEEE Access articles are in IEEE Xplore’s Top 10 Most Popular downloads every month.

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 the standardization of wireless networks.