Overview
Now that the 802.11be task group has started to wrap up its standardization efforts, the IEEE 802.11 working group has turned its attention to the development of the next generation Wi-Fi standard. The recently formed Ultra High Reliability (UHR) study group will work on drafting a Project Authorization Request (PAR) of what will become the next major release of Wi-Fi, i.e., Wi-Fi 8. Compared to 802.11be (i.e., Wi-Fi 7) mainly focuses on improving the throughput (i.e., Extremely High Throughput Wi-Fi), UHR focuses on reliability. In this paper, we give an overview of the potential technologies and use cases that are currently being discussed in the UHR study group with the hope of encouraging wireless researchers to contribute to its development.
What’s inside:
As Wi-Fi applications evolve, their demand for higher data rate, lower latencies and higher reliability also continuously increases. Therefore, even before 802.11be devices start to proliferate, the IEEE 802.11 working group is already preparing the next generation 802.11 standard. The IEEE 802.11 working group voting members have agreed to form the Ultra High Reliability (UHR) Study Group (SG) during the July 2022 plenary meeting with a Yes vote of 134 and a No vote of 8 (94% approval) with the intent of creating a Project Authorization Request (PAR) and a Criteria for Standards Development (CSD) which initiate the creation of the next generation Wireless LAN (WLAN) standard. When both CSR and PAR are approved, a task group for UHR will be created whose task is to develop the actual new technologies that will be included in Wi-Fi 8.
During the time this paper was written, the UHR SG has yet to approve official PAR and CSD drafts. However, according to the latest versions of two proposed PAR documents, UHR will be able to support a maximum aggregate throughput of at least 100 Gbps and carrier frequencies that cover the millimeter wave bands. For latency sensitive applications, UHR is expected to provide improvements in terms of maximum latency and jitter at the 99 to 99.9999th percentile compared to 802.11be.
Due to the competition for channel access in the unlicensed bands, providing a highly reliable connection has become increasingly harder to achieve. As the standardization for UHR is still in the very early stages, it is hard to predict what technologies will be adopted to achieve UHR’s goal. In this paper, we review a number of technologies that have the potential to be adopted in the UHR standardization based on the early UHR SG discussions during the November 2022 IEEE 802.11 plenary meeting and UHR SG conference calls. These technologies include multiple access point (AP) coordination and transmission (Section II), low latency mechanisms (Section III) and millimeter wave (mmWave) links (Section IV). We conclude the paper in Section V.
In this whitepaper, you will learn more about:
- Multi-AP Transmission
- Low Latency
- Millimeter Wave Links
