A Survey of Wi-Fi 6: Technologies, Advances, and Challenges

Abstract

Wi-Fi is a popular wireless technology and is continuously extended to keep pace with requirements such as high throughput, real-time communication, dense networks, or resource and energy efficiency. The IEEE 802.11ax standard, also known as Wi-Fi 6, promises to provide data rates of up to almost 10 Gb/s, lower energy consumption, and higher reliability. Its capabilities go far beyond Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and novel technical concepts have been introduced for this purpose. As such, the Wi-Fi 6 standard includes Multi-User Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (MU OFDMA), Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU MIMO), new mechanisms for Spatial Reuse (SR), new mechanisms for power saving, higher-order modulation, and additional minor improvements. In this paper, we provide a survey of Wi-Fi 6. Initially, we provide a compact technological summary of Wi-Fi 5 and its predecessors. Then, we discuss the potential application domains of Wi-Fi 6, which are enabled through its novel features. Subsequently, we explain these features and review the related works in these areas. Finally, performance evaluation tools for Wi-Fi 6 and future roadmaps are discussed.

Keywords

• IEEE 802.11ax
• Wi-Fi 6
• spatial reuse
• OFDMA
• MU-MIMO
• target wake time (TWT)