WiFi7 - A Conversation with Carlos Cordeiro: In Between the Tech, Season 3, Episode 14, Part 3

IN BETWEEN THE TECH
WiFi 7 Part 3

Welcome to In Between the Tech. Today we’re wrapping up Mouser’s look at WiFi 7. Carlos Cordeiro, Intel Fellow, Wireless CTO of the Client Computing Group of Intel Corporation, and Chairman of the WiFi Alliance, sits down with Mouser to share his thoughts this technology and the opportunities for engineers in this space. Listen as he shares his perspective on WiFi 7.

Carlos, thanks for joining us. Tell me, how did you come to join the WiFi Alliance?

Carlos Cordeiro
The WiFi Alliance, it's really the leading alliance today in the industry that defines what WiFi is. It is that the WiFi Alliance that as an industry with almost 800 members, that we all come together defining the requirements of the WiFi technology and what the users have come to use and love for two dozen years. And my involvement in the WiFi Alliance, it started about 10 years ago.

We started back in the days with my involvement around what, today, we have come to know as a WiFi 5 based on 11ac and then WiFi 6. I also was very involved, actually even more than these technologies, on the definition of something that we've come to know as wireless gigabit technology, WiGig, which is essentially a technology that operates in the millimeter wave, specifically the 60 Ghz frequency band. And for the past 10 years, I've been working on that Alliance in different roles. I also have the benefit of being appointed by my employer, Intel Corporation, to the Board of the WiFi Alliance. And I've been serving for almost a year and a half. It's going to be two years early next year as the Chairman of the Board of the WiFi Alliance. That has a separate distinctive role when it comes to my involvement as an Intel employee.

But I've had a pleasure to be involved in a great Alliance, and we are really working with all of the members to make sure that we are bringing the best technologies to market when it comes to WiFi. That is not just the technologies that users see it, but there's so many things that happen under the hood to make sure that we have the best certification and testing and interoperability. And that's really what the industry comes together to define what today users think. It's so easy, WiFi just connects and just works, but there's so much work that happens under the hood to make sure that users experience the seamless and easy and secure connectivity that WiFi provides.

Given your depth of involvement in WiFi 7, what aspect of the technology are you most excited about? And where do you see the biggest impact between WiFi6 and WiFi7?

WiFi 7 is really a major evolution in the WiFi technology. It not only brings greater speeds and feeds to WiFi, but it actually improves in other angles, in other dimensions compared to previous WiFi technologies. So, one aspect that makes me very excited about WiFi 7 is, in fact, that ability to deliver greater speeds and be able to serve a greater number of users applications that have more and more increased demands. So, if you think about gaming applications and my kids, for example, they always want to play games and make sure that you can achieve that single-digit millisecond latency, which is so important for so many games, or whether in this video conference that we have right now. Having this podcast where we want to make sure that the voice packets, they get the right priority so that packets can be transmitted to this Cloud server and therefore things are on time, or whether you are having virtual reality.

There are so many people now that are using VR/AR games and content and making sure that you have the traffic being prioritized and being delivered at the right time. So I'm really excited about all these features in WiFi 7. And there is one particular feature that I think can deliver to many of these metrics, which is one called the multi-link operation. So multi-link operation is essentially the ability that WiFi now has to manage multiple links at the same time. And let me just define a little bit more by what we mean about the link, because I think a lot of people will probably be a bit confused unless I explain that.

So, in legacy WiFi technology, what I mean by legacy is previous generations - WiFi 6 and below - whenever you connect to an access point, you are always connecting on a particular band and channel. So, if you pay attention how you connect to your laptop, your access point, when you're on your home, on your phone to access point, you are always looking for that WiFi network and you are always trying to connect. And then you connect to that access point. Your connection is associated with a given frequency channel and on a given band that the access point operates. And whenever you want to move your connection, whenever you want to, a client wants to go from one channel to another, or the access point wants to move a client from one channel to the other, the client has to go to a complete re-association, right? So you essentially lose all the state information that you have from the prior connection and then your new connection. You have to establish everything from anew from the access point side. The access point, again, these are two separate network even though you may see that you have a network in the 2.4 GHz band and another one in the 5 GHz band.

Those are different networks both from the access point and from the client side. And that's roughly what we define as a link, right? That's connection 2.5 GHz and 5 GHz in those channels. That is what we define as a link. A link is more generic. It can even be two channels also in the same band. So two channels in the 5 GHz band for example. And also even in the 6 GHz band, the new frequency band that has been recently allocated for unlicensed operation in the US and in many countries around the world. So now with this going back to the feature for WiFi 7, which is called multi-link operation, what essentially it does is that allows the access point now to manage this multiple links, seamlessly. So now, whereas before I could only talk to one client on one channel with WiFi 7, now I can essentially talk to different clients or even the same client on multiple links simultaneously or basically doing some sort of time division quickly moving a client from one channel to another seamlessly and without disruptive, without having to redo your connectivity like you would do in the WiFi 6, for example.

Other technologies with talk to the client, move that client quickly and seamlessly from one link to another, from 2.5 GHz to 5 GHz, from 5 GHz to 6 GHz in a very seamless manner. And doing so basically gives us so many more flexibility now because you can use that to achieve those single digital millisecond latencies that we are talking about for gaming. Because now, essentially, now I have more chances to basically transmit because instead of just being tied to one particular link to one particular channel, I now have the flexibility to choose whatever channel becomes available first. So that decreases my access to the channel. Therefore I can get that packet, that gaming packet, that voice packet, that video packet. I can get that across more quickly. I can use those different links to also increase my capacity because now I can use multiple links at the same time and I can use that for more robustness because I can even send the same packet across multiple links and therefore increase the reliability of the network if that's the need for the application. So there's so many flexibility now that WiFi 7 is going to bring. So it's really a major stepping stone from WiFi 6, which it's the current generation and there's so many things that happening around WiFi 6, but WiFi 7 is really going to bring a major boost that's going to allow developers and users to experience so much more from WiFi.

You mentioned several industries, but do you see a specific industry embracing WiFi 7 more than others?

Yeah, so that's a great question. Different generations of WiFi. If I just look at it historically, the adoption has of course been different by different industries. We always see, for example, the retail market, it being one market that quickly adopts WiFi. Whenever you have a new generation, immediately you start to see retail access points that are supporting the latest and greatest generation WiFi. We do expect that to happen also with WiFi 7. So you have that, those retail, those high-end access points that will serve gamers as one example, mostly tailored towards home users, people that are the ones that are the, what we call the prosumers, the professional consumers that always looking for the latest and greatest in technology.

But at the same time, the volumes in those markets, they're not significant. When it really gets to more significant volumes, when it comes to WiFi, I think we most of the look at two segments. One being the enterprise segment, which is a major segment. If you look around your office environment, I bet you that you can use WiFi all over. Whenever you go to different offices or the airports, airport lounges or coffee shops, you always see WiFi in those spaces. And I think for WiFi 7 enterprises will be one major driving force, especially because of the refresh cycle that the enterprises go through. It actually happens to coincide with the availability of WiFi 7 devices. So I think we can expect to see the enterprise market adopting larger volumes, WiFi technology.

And then you have also the other market segment of WiFi, which is homes. I mean our homes, our houses where we use WiFi for everything. Just imagine how many WiFi devices you had in your house five years ago, and in just five years, how many more devices you have today that are connected over WiFi. So service providers, the one that actually bring connectivity to your house, those are definitely very a large market segment for WiFi, just for the sheer number of homes, of course, not just in US, but I'm really talking broadly around the world. That market tends to be a market that they're not the first one to launch the new generation, right? Because they have to go through major validation and testing and making sure that the technology works smoothly for the customer and for the end customer enterprise customers, they already have an IT department.

After the retail, the enterprises tend to have the adoption in a larger volume followed by the operators because they have to do so much more extensive testing to make sure that the end user, my mom, is in Brazil right now, and she's happy that whenever she buys her access point that it works. She doesn't have to do anything, just replaces. She plugs it in and it works. And that's the type of experience that cable operators they need to provide to their users.

And so they naturally take longer to be able to validate. It's about security, it's about interference because you have many access points. It's about just making sure that the legacy devices, because sometimes you replace your access point, but you still have that old thermostat, that old WiFi device that you take so much longer to replace. Now you need to make sure as someone that is deploying those new access points in homes, that those devices, they can still connect, even though you are replacing that with the latest and greatest technology. You don't want a consumer to be calling operators and every time that you replace a device to say, “hey, you have to send somebody here because this is not working anymore.” So we do see, again, retail, enterprises and then the mass market of operators really deploying WiFi, roughly that order.

We know the roll out date for WiFi 7’s release has pushed a few times with its launch now being early 2024. Do you think this will this delay its adoption?

Well, I don't think so. I mean I think that there have been already, so there are a few things that there are already announcements from certain vendors of WiFi 7 devices. You have seen probably some of those already in the market when it comes to certified devices. What I mean by that, going back to your first question on the WiFi Alliance, which is where all these members come together and we define the requirements, we define what 5, 6, and 7, in this case, is. We do expect to see certification around the WiFi 7 coming out by the timeframe that you just mentioned. We don't see that shifting from our perspective. And I think a lot of the adopters of this technology, were already working with this timeframe in mind. And so I do see that we are on time. I do see that there's already a lot of work happening across the industry with these various segments that we talked about to make sure that the WiFi 7 technology is validated and it's along the process of getting that to market and getting that to users. Whether that is, again, consumers, they usually adopt first or enterprises next. The work is already started to make sure that next year we are going to be to enjoy this technology in our own laptops and phones and access points and enterprises over time. Of course, that's how the rollout happens.

We’ve talked about retail and enterprise. What new applications or use cases does WiFi 7 bring?

In addition to those applications, I wanted to call out a few other things which I think are important. So today people do a lot of video conferencing. WiFi with that MLO feature with wider channels, we actually doubled the channel from one 160 to 320 MHz with high order modulation. That in itself will help a lot of these use cases that we talked about, whether that's gaming or video conferencing, because now we can essentially imagine now we are doing this video conference, if I am now talking to my access point on one link, let's say that's 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, and then suddenly my kid starts playing his game on his bedroom and the traffic that he's sending somehow is calling some coach congestion in the, and I cannot send my video packet.

And at the same time that he's so well the access point now with the client, the client can be smart enough to say, well, hold on. Now I can move from one link to the other dynamically in the order of microseconds to then send that packet on another link. So that capability now, which is I think it's really exciting from WiFi 7 perspective, is going to enable those use cases that we already know to work better because now it's going to be so much more flexibility now with the way that packets can be sent across between access points and clients. And that allows us something that I really like to call deterministic operation. And this is really a key thing that I believe WiFi 7 will be of immense help many times today you don't need the 5 Gbps, the fastest link. Many applications rather, they need deterministic and reliable link something that whenever I have a packet to send, look, I don't send packets very often, but whenever I have to send something, I just want to make sure that the network is available for me.

So it's where deterministic cooperation is really important. It’s being able to provide a given latency. So if you need to send data within say 10, 20 milliseconds. The NERC needs to guarantee with a certain reliability, whether that is 99.99%, that whenever you have a packet, you'll be able to send that packet within that amount of time. And that is something that really excites me about WiFi 7 - really does open up these industrial IoT for example, and other segments. So think about healthcare, not the healthcare of you going to a healthcare establishment and being able to use that guest network. I'm not talking about that, right? I'm really talking about devices that in your bedside monitor for example, that could be connecting that actually today they do connect already over wireless, but now you can offer that level of guarantees.

I say, look, you can get that packet with five lines, with four lines or how many lines depends on the application needs. And you can send that package with a given reliability in that short window of time that you need to deliver a package. And the reason that WiFi 7, by the way, helps with that is because this multi-link operation, this ability now to know I don't just look at one channel now I look at multiple channels, multiple links and whatever's available first. So even if you have something that is congested in one place, that something happens in one place and then because there are other people using it, I can grab another channel and I can make sure that I send you a packet on another channel. So that gives that statistical multiplexing across multiple links that will help you to be able to get your packet across with a given latency in a given availability. There are so many usages going back in addition to our video conference and playing a game and the traditional office environment that people are with voice calls and people use WiFi calls, and I'm sure many of you have used, but it opens up these other usages that by the way, many of them are served by WiFi today, but they're not. They cannot be offering that level of reliability determinism that WiFi 7 can now bring to the table that before we could not.

I’m excited for the rollout of WiFi 7, but what comes after WiFi7? What improvements can be made for future releases?

Being as someone that works very close to technology, I cannot sit here and not tell you that we are not already thinking about the next generation and that we are already thinking about, hey, how we can improve this and what are the various areas that we can do better. So a few years ago we started a process within Intel to actually look at what we called wireless 2030. And we started, we actually about three years ago, the whole idea was to look at how wireless is going to change by year 2030. I mean, what are the new trends? What are the new experiences? How are users going to expect to use technology and how wireless plays a role in those technology? And therefore distilling that from tops down to look into the needs of the different experience from a wireless perspective. And we did this exercise a few years ago internally, but also we discussing with partners outside trying to validate some of our assumptions, validate some of our use cases and trends.

And that process of course maps to various technologies, not just WiFi users have WiFi for data, but they use Bluetooth for voice and they use wireless WAN for if they're outdoors. So there is really a broad spectrum how it's mapped, even Ethernet if your device happens to be connected over Ethernet. So we've done that exercise and of course a piece of it comes from a WiFi perspective. What do we need to do better? And so as we're look into the future, in this case after WiFi 7, I think it's easy to imagine that we're going to be a WiFi 8.

There are certain areas I think that are really important for us to be working on to be able to deliver to some of those experience, some of those trends that we identified early on. Number one, WiFi 7 was the first step towards deterministic operation that we just talked about in the last question. There is so much more we can do in that space. There are so many other usages and applications that yes, with WiFi 7, with that multi-link operation, we can really step into those other segments to be able to offer some guarantees and lower latencies. But I can tell you that latency improvement, in other words, be able to reduce latency to be able to offer better guarantees for that reduced latency. There are so many things that we can do at the physical layer. Those are terms that we can offer better guarantees.

And don't forget, I mean I think it's really important for the audience to understand WiFi operates in unlicensed spectrum, that spectrum that other users can also operate. This is not dedicated spectrum for WiFi. We can have Bluetooth operating there in 2.4 GHz and there is discussions that Bluetooth is also going to be operating the high bend. And there are other technologies, ultrawide band that operates in 6 GHz. And so there are many other users of the spectrum and even incumbent users when you talk about 5 and 6 GHz. So the point being that with WiFi 7, we are making that first step towards deterministic cooperation, but there's so much more that we can do. So you'll see improvements on deterministic cooperation aspects of latency that will be really, really important to be able to better support, to be able to better cater to those use cases that need that type of operation.

The other aspect that I think it's really noteworthy and I wanted to comment on is we talk about access points today, but just if you take a step back, for example, can you think about how many access points you have in your house today and how many access points you have in an enterprise today? I mean, at least in my house, because I'm a geeky and I have four access points because my son wants a great connectivity, so I have to place one close to him. And we have these mesh systems that are being deployed in houses today, right? There are many houses now that have these mesh systems and with multiple access points who provide whole home coverage or you have an enterprise how many access points in an enterprise. But when you look at it from the WiFi perspective, these access points, they all act independently of each other.

There's no coordination. I mean, there's some soft coordination or perhaps say if you go to net enterprise today with all those access points, yes, you do have a control, a wireless link controller that is in the infrastructure that offers some level of non-real time control. Meaning I can place this access point on this channel, I can place this access point on this channel, I can set a transmit power, but there's some knobs that you can control, but this is not a real-time control, right? On a real-time level, specs have been transmitted these packets from these access points. If they're not coordinated, they can be causing collision, right? And transmissions from one natural to the other network, they can be colliding with each charter or you cannot be achieving the best spectrum efficiency because you have these multiple access points and not really coordinating at the more fine granular level.

When I say fine granular, I'm really talking about the level of even single transmissions not really in this course manner that is done today. And so what you're going to see also in WiFi in the next WiFi generation, I think you're going to see is what we call multi-access point coordination. These access points, now they're going to be coordinating with each other. With WiFi 8, we're going to see this coordination. And I think together with this multi access point coordination, what is coordination is done in time, frequency, and space and these mechanisms for better latency, more predictable latency. And there are so many other things by the way, that go under these umbrellas. But I would say just, I think for the audience right now, I'll just focus on these two major topics that I think are going to be big topics for the next generation of WiFi and there are tons of technical features that are going to be developed to deliver to these capabilities.