In this digitalised era, technologies are increasing every day for fulfilling the requirements and demands of customers. Everything in this modern era is based upon the internet (mobile society) that is from sending messages to one another to paying all the bills online. For this, customers require high-speed wireless access whereas, in recent years, Wi-Fi is getting faster day by day so as to overcome the challenges faced by customers while accessing the internet from anywhere and at any time. In the last decade, most people have moved online due to increased services provided by Wi-Fi.

Introduction to Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is short for Wireless Fidelity which refers to wireless networking protocols which are based upon IEEE 802.11 network. Wi-Fi was first introduced in 1997, and the latest Wi-Fi technology was released in 2019, known as 802.11ax, covering six generations (Bokhari, 2019). Wi-Fi was created to fulfill the ever-expanding requirements of customers for video calls, online streaming, gaming and various other activities. Different Wi-Fi standards are:

Source: https://wixalia.com/en/wifi-6-features-benefits-and-conditions-of-deployment/

What is the need for Wi-Fi 6?

Wi-Fi 6 is the fastest among all the other Wi-Fi’s, that is, Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5, as Wi-Fi 6 provides up to 4 times the speed of Wi-Fi 5. The primary motive of developing this is to fulfill the demands of Wi-Fi needs, such as performance, diversity of applications and increasing density of devices (Intel, 2020). In short, it can be demonstrated that Wi-Fi 6 provides better communication when interacting with multiple devices as well as help in prioritizing traffic across multiple devices. This is done by initiating three major improvements in Wi-Fi 6, which includes:

• Multi-User – Multiple Input and Multiple Output technology (MU-MIMO)
• Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)
• Target Wake–Up Time (TWT)

MU-MIMO helps in transferring information to multiple devices at the same time, OFDMA helps in increasing the speed of data transfer activity as well as initiates reduction in latency time, and TWT helps in reducing the energy consumption of access points. Apart from this, spatial reuse, dual-carrier modulation, 1024QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and extended range are the features that are provided by Wi-Fi 6 but are not followed by other networks.

Source: https://www.wi-fi.org/discover-wi-fi/wi-fi-certified-6

In brief, Wi-Fi 6 provides greater capacity, network slicing, improved security, lower latency, enhanced coverage, and better throughput, multi-access edge computing and higher density (GEORGE & GEORGE, 2020). With this, there is the availability of huge opportunities in the manufacturing business as the the latest emerging technologies will be integrated for increasing performance and efficiency (GEORGE & GEORGE, 2020).

Advantages of Wi-Fi 6

There are various advantages of Wi-Fi 6 because of which it is used widely in today’s generation:

• Increased access point capacity: It is one of the most important benefits of Wi-Fi 6 as it allows the connection of multiple device counts for AP. For instance, a person working in a manufacturing industry come across various access points, including scanners, sensors, etc., so as to make them work efficiently without any jitter.
• Increased speed: Another advantage is an increase in speed whereas it provides 70 % faster speed, as well as coverage, which is 50 % more with no dead zones. Using this, an individual can easily stream videos online on different platforms as well as can download any file without any lag (Kastrenakes, 2019). This is because of efficient bandwidth management of access points in Wi-Fi 6.
• Efficient Bandwidth sharing: In earlier Wi-Fi’s, when the count of connected devices increases there is a decrease in speed which is eliminated in the case of Wi-Fi 6 with the use of FDMA. Frequency division multiple access is used in Wi-Fi 6 because of bandwidth is shared appropriately for every transmission. Herein, every connected device uses a single channel for transmission with variable frequency bands because of which there is no wastage of bandwidth and efficiency is improved.
• Improved battery life: This Wi-Fi standard have protocols that put devices to sleep when they are not using Wi-Fi but are connected, this will help in freeing up the bandwidth, thus increasing speed and battery life (Romero, 2020). Moreover, with the implementation of a new function that is TWT, a user has the ability to tell the device when to suspend and when to wake for receiving a transmission. This will also help in saving the battery life of Wi-Fi.
• Improved Security: With the introduction of an enhanced security protocol, WPA3, Wi-Fi connections have become safer with different encryption methods and help in protecting the system from various attacks such as Man in the middle attack, packet sniffing, Wi-Fi jamming and many more.

Disadvantages of Wi-Fi 6

Despite of various advantages provided by Wi-Fi 6, there are some of the disadvantages too, which are highlighted as follows:

• Since Wi-Fi 6 has a smaller range comparable to that of a 5GHz network, which can result in signal interruption if an obstruction between the device and router is encountered.
• In Wi-Fi 6, the data transfer rate decreases when there is a significant increase in the number of users and connection requests to the Wi-Fi network, and the data transfer rate decreases.
• Another drawback of Wi-Fi 6  is that it is expensive.
• In order to properly use this technology, users need to have a broadband connection of Gigabit-class (Vivek, 2019).
• For achieving the best performance of Wi-Fi 6, tight frequency synchronization is required.
• Wi-Fi 6  stations need to maintain a frame timing that is based on clocks, which is necessary for their transmission to be as per the trigger frame and scheduling (Romero, 2020).

References

1. Bokhari, S. (2019). Introduction and Architecture of Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). Retrieved 12 February 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333310281_Introduction_and_Architecture_of_Wi-Fi_6_80211ax.
2. GEORGE, A., & GEORGE, A. (2020). A Review of Wi-Fi 6: The Revolution of 6th Generation Wi-Fi Technology. International Journal Of Engineering And Science, 10(9). Retrieved 12 February 2022,.
3. Intel. (2020). What Is Wi-Fi 6? – Intel. Intel. Retrieved 12 February 2022, from https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/wifi-6.html.
4. Kastrenakes, J. (2019). Wi-Fi 6, explained: how fast it really is. The Verge. Retrieved 12 February 2022, from https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/21/18232026/wi-fi-6-speed-explained-router-wifi-how-does-work.
5. Romero, S. (2020). Advantages and disadvantages of Wi-Fi 6. MegaInteresting.com. Retrieved 12 February 2022, from https://www.megainteresting.com/techno/article/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-wi-fi-6-711582028368.
6. Vivek. (2019). Wi-Fi 6 Technology Explained With Pros And Cons. https://www.gizbot.com/. Retrieved 12 February 2022, from https://www.gizbot.com/internet/features/wifi-6-technology-explained-with-pros-and-cons-062578.html?story=2.