A Tutorial on Wi-Fi 8: The Journey to Ultra High Reliability

Abstract

Wi-Fi is evolving to support new areas such as extended reality, Industrial Internet of Things, and environments with numerous devices. Unlike previous generations that aimed to maximize peak and user-perceived throughput, Wi-Fi 8 (also known as IEEE 802.11bn Ultra High Reliability) intends to make Wi-Fi operation more reliable, i.e., to improve performance across the full range of scenarios, particularly in worst-case conditions. Specifically, 802.11bn is striving to increase throughput at various signal to interference and noise ratio levels, diminish the 95th percentile of latency, decrease packet losses, and reduce power consumption. To attain these ambitions, Wi-Fi 8 is going to introduce a series of groundbreaking mechanisms, including distributed-tone resource units, unequal modulations, prioritized and non-primary channel access, advanced roaming features, multi-AP coordination, and so on. We present the current status of Wi-Fi 8 development with an emphasis on the targets and enabling technologies. This tutorial also discusses open research directions that require the development of new intelligent methods and algorithms.