8 Designing for Next Gen Wi-Fi Applications
The Wi-Fi
Evolution
Jaidev Sharma Director, Applications
Engineering Wireless Communication
Business Unit
Introduction
Over the past 20 years, IEEE 802.11—
commonly referred to as Wi-Fi — has
evolved from 2Mbps to over gigabit speeds,
a 1,000-fold increase in throughput. The
standard has continuously advanced itself
by introducing new protocols such as
802.11n, 802.11ac and 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6).
The new standards support higher order
of modulation schemes such as 64QAM
(quadrature amplitude modulation), 256QAM
and 1024QAM. These new standards also
support transmission of multiple streams to a
single client or multiple clients simultaneously.
In addition to increasing peak data rates, efforts
have been made to improve spectral efficiency
that characterizes how well the system uses the
available spectrum. Multi-user techniques, such as
multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO)
and orthogonal frequency division multiple access
(OFDMA), have been introduced to improve network
efficiency and network capacity. Once Wi-Fi (802.11)
standards have been released and implemented, the world
began to transform as markets opened and new technology
emerged. Each new standard is built on previous standard
with improvement in speed and reliability.
