IEEE | 802.11ax: An Overview of High Efficiency Wi-Fi

IEEE Standard 802.11ax^TM enhances the speed and reliability of wireless networks in high density environments. It is the latest step in a journey of continuous innovation in the wireless local area networks (LAN) standards and is the underlying technology of the latest Wi-Fi 6 products. Unlike previous amendments (e.g., 802.11ac, 802.11n) which were focused mainly on increasing the peak throughput, 802.11ax focuses on achieving higher efficiency (HE) and improving metrics that reflect the user experience, such as average throughput per station. This was achieved with better physical layer efficiency and spectrum utilization, flexible multi-access and scheduled transmission schemes, increasing the spatial reuse, and improving interference management between neighboring networks, particularly in dense environments.

This two-course program provides an overview of the features and optimizations introduced by IEEE 802.11ax to the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers, which lead to these improvements. The program also includes an update on the P802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) project.

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Courses Included in the Program:

Course 1: PHY Layer Focus
• Background on IEEE 802.11ax
• Main PHY features in IEEE 802.11ax (e.g., band support, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), Multi User-Multi Input Multi Output (MU-MIMO)
• Numerology and tone plan (new numerology, tone plan, resource unit for OFDMA)
• PHY Protocol Data Unit (PPDU) formats (four PPDU formats)
• Miscellaneous topics in PHY operation (triggered operation, sounding sequence, and preamble puncturing)
Course 2: MAC Layer Focus
• Overview of the the main MAC features in IEEE 802.11ax
• MAC support for multi-user operation (uplink (UL)/downlink (DL) OFDMA/MIMO)
• Channel Access Enhancements
• Power Save protocols
• Frame Aggregation Enhancements
• Operation in the 6 GHz band

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