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Title: What's the difference between Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6？ [Print this page]

Author: zhangqiao@ruiji Time: 2024-9-12 09:14
Title: What's the difference between Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 6？
Wi-Fi 7 vs Wi-Fi 6

	Wi-Fi 6	Wi-Fi 7
IEEE Standard	802.11ax	802.11be
Maximum Transfer Rate	9.6Gbps	23Gbps
Frequency Band	2.4GHz、5GHz、6GHz (Only Wi-Fi 6E)	2.4GHz、5GHz、6GHz
Security Protocol	WPA3	WPA3
Channel Bandwidth	20MHz、40MHz、80MHz、160MHz、80+80MHz	Up to 320MHz
Modulation System	1024-QAM OFDMA	4096-QAM OFDMA

New features supported by Wi-Fi 7
1.Supports maximum bandwidth of 320MHz
Unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands is limited and congested, and existing Wi-Fi inevitably suffers from low QoS when running emerging applications such as VR/AR. In order to achieve the goal of maximum throughput improvement, Wi-Fi 7 will continue to introduce the 6GHz band and add new bandwidth modes, including continuous 240MHz, non-continuous 160+80MHz, continuous 320 MHz and non-continuous 160+160 MHZ.
2.Multi-RU mechanism is supported
In Wi-Fi 6, each user can only send or receive frames on a specific RU assigned to it, greatly limiting the flexibility of spectrum resource scheduling. To address this issue and further improve spectral efficiency, Wi-Fi 7 defines a mechanism that allows multiple RU to be assigned to a single user. Of course, in order to balance the complexity of the implementation and the utilization of the spectrum, the combination of RU is limited in the protocol, namely: Small size RU (less than 242-Tone RU) can only be combined with small size RU, large size RU (greater than or equal to 242-Tone RU) can only be combined with large size RU, do not allow small size RU and large size RU mixing.
3.The higher order 4096-QAM modulation technology is introduced
The maximum modulation mode for Wi-Fi 6 is 1024-QAM, where the modulation symbol carries 10bits. To further increase the speed, Wi-Fi 7 will introduce 4096-QAM so that the modulation symbol carries 12 bits. With the same encoding, 4096-QAM of Wi-Fi 7 can achieve a 20% rate improvement over 1024-QAM of Wi-Fi 6.
4.The Multi-Link mechanism is introduced
In order to achieve the efficient use of all available spectrum resources, there is an urgent need to establish new spectrum management, coordination and transmission mechanisms at 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz. The working group defines the technologies related to multi-link aggregation, mainly including the MAC architecture of enhanced multi-link aggregation, multi-link channel access and multi-link transmission.

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