The Wi-Fi 7 era is well underway, with early adopters taking advantage of the speed and efficiency delivered by the newest iteration of the standard, known as IEEE 802.11be EHT (Extremely High Throughput).

Work began on the standard with the March 2019 creation of an IEEE task group to work on the next generation of wireless LAN. Thousands of innovators representing hundreds of companies came together to standardise a Wi-Fi specification that meets the growing demand for use cases like the emergence of 4K and 8K video and the proliferation of new high-throughput applications including Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, gaming, remote work and cloud computing.

This new standard significantly enhances Wi-Fi performance across the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands. It delivers high throughput, low latency, and sturdy reliability in homes, enterprises, and industrial environments. It also builds upon the advances of Wi-Fi 6 to further enhance performance in dense environments like stadiums and large campuses where a high number of devices are all competing for bandwidth.

This performance upgrade does not rest on a single breakthrough invention – it is the product of a long, collaborative and careful process of marrying many different technical advances and ensuring that they work together in a complex system. That’s what standardisation is all about.

Let’s look at some of the key Wi-Fi 7 features that work in concert to unlock capabilities were previously out of reach.

Wider channels, better modulation

One of the most significant upgrades in Wi-Fi 7 is the introduction of 320 MHz channels in the 6GHz band, which is twice the maximum channel width offered by Wi-Fi 6. This allows for more data to be transmitted simultaneously, enhancing overall throughput. It’s a crucial advancement for applications that are data-heavy and require immense bandwidth. The figure below illustrates how these wider channels (shown in pink) increase the transmission rate and promote more efficient use of spectrum. In countries with 1200 MHz of available spectrum in this band, three channels can be aggregated.

A related technology, known as Preamble Puncturing, was optional under Wi-Fi 6 but has made mandatory requirement for all Wi-Fi 7 products. This lets a device bypass interference from neighbouring networks or radio sources by “puncturing” or “splitting” part of a Wi-Fi channel. The rest of the channel remains usable with better internet speed, particularly in busy and built-up environments. Imagine the authorities closed an entire three-lane highway due to a disruption or accident affecting a single lane. That was the scenario before the introduction of this feature. Preamble Puncturing allows bandwidth to be split into additional usable channels. Access points modify the preamble of their data packets to tell devices which chunks of frequency are not being used, comparable in our analogy to keeping the highway open and simply telling traffic which lanes to avoid. This is crucial for avoiding interference and maximising the use of available spectrum, ensuring a more stable and reliable connection.

Wi-Fi 7 also offers higher order modulation – this means more information can be carried by each “symbol” transmitted by radio wave in a Wi-Fi 7 system. Under Wi-Fi 6’s 1024- quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) mode, each symbol carried up to 10 bits. Wi-Fi 7 introduces 4096-QAM, which allows each symbol to carry 12 bits (the math is explained in the figure below). This translates to a 20% increase in the data transmission rate with no change in coding.

Source: https://www.tp-link.com/us/blog/733/wi-fi-7-fundamentals-what-is-4k-qam-/Wi-Fi 7 Fundamentals: What is 4K-QAM? – TP-Link

The bottom line is that all of these changes enable a higher data transmission rate and more efficient use of spectrum.

More ways to connect, better reliability

One of the most innovative features of Wi-Fi 7 is Multi-link Operations (MLO). This provides for multiple (three) radio connections to be established between one access point and one device. The traffic load can then be balanced among these three connections.

Think of it this way: Wi-Fi 6 used a technology called MU-MIMO to provide eight separate lanes in an information ‘highway’ between access point and device. Rather than merely adding more lanes to the highway, Wi-Fi 7 has introduced an air route and a rail route as well. Each batch of data is sent simultaneously over all three routes.  By allowing devices to connect across multiple frequency bands (2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz) simultaneously, Wi-Fi 7 can enhance reliability, reduce latency and improve data rates. This is especially useful in situations where one band might be congested or experiencing interference, as the network can seamlessly shift traffic to a less-congested band.

Flexible scheduling

Wi-Fi 7 also tackles the challenge of spectrum efficiency with Multi-RU (Resource Unit) support. In Wi-Fi 6, a user could only send or receive frames on a single Resource Unit (RU) allocated to them, which limited the flexibility of spectrum scheduling.

To extend the highway analogy, imagine a highway with a mix of wide lanes and narrow lanes. In Wi-Fi 6, each user can use only a single assigned lane, whether they are driving a lorry or a motorcycle. Wi-Fi 7 introduces a mechanism for allocating multiple lanes (RUs) to a single user, which can combine them if needed. This allows for more efficient use of spectrum. To minimise complexity, small RUs (containing fewer than 242 ‘tones’) cannot be combined with large RUs (with greater than or equal to 242 ‘tones’).

Identifying essential Wi-Fi innovations 

As the leading patent pool operator in the Wi-Fi space, Sisvel keeps a close eye on how the technology is developing. All of the patents included in our Wi-Fi related licensing programmes have been evaluated by a third party for essentiality to the relevant standard.

The Sisvel Tech team includes a bench of engineers with Wi-Fi expertise who support pool operations and play a leading role in technical discussions. These practices significantly increase the transparency of the Wi-Fi licensing space.

By publishing the largest publicly available list of patents evaluated to be essential to Wi-Fi standards, and by helping our licensees understand the value and the necessity of obtaining permission to use the patents in our programmes, we are shedding light on the role patented inventions have played in powering one of technology’s great 21^st Century success stories.

Stay tuned for more updates from the Sisvel Tech team on the Wi-Fi advancements that will shape the connected future. 

Alessia Autolitano, Andrea Pezzoli and Roberto Ricci are Wi-Fi experts with Sisvel Technology based in None (Turin), Italy.