Qualcomm’s “core”QCN9274 leads WiFi 7 to break through the boundaries of wireless connections

From 802.11n, 802.11ac, 802.11ax, 802.11be to WiFi 4, WiFi 5, WiFi 6, WiFi 7, technology updates have not only changed their names, but also brought about changes in the market.

Whether it is home digital consumption or commercial enterprise IT products are updated at a very fast pace. If you are a little negligent, you will be "abandoned by the times"

What is WiFi7? What is the difference compared with WiFi6?

WiFi 7 (Wi-Fi 7) is the next generation Wi-Fi standard, corresponding to IEEE 802.11, which will release a new revised standard IEEE 802.11be – Extremely High Throughput EHT (Extremely High Throughput). Wi-Fi 7 introduces 320MHz bandwidth, 4096-QAM, Multi-RU, multi-link operation, enhanced MU-MIMO, multi-AP collaboration and other technologies on the basis of Wi-Fi 6, making Wi-Fi 7 compared to Wi-Fi 6 will provide higher data transmission rates and lower latency. Wi-Fi 7 is expected to support up to 30Gbps throughput, approximately three times that of Wi-Fi 6.

With the development of WLAN technology, families and enterprises are increasingly relying on Wi-Fi as the main means of accessing the network. When 4K and 8K video (transmission rates may reach 20Gbps), VR/AR, games (latency requirements are less than 5ms), remote office, online video conferencing and cloud computing are used more and more frequently, new applications will have a higher impact on throughput. The throughput rate and latency requirements are also increasing. Although Wi-Fi 6 has focused on user experience in high-density scenarios, the throughput rate and latency requirements still cannot fully meet the above-mentioned higher requirements.

With the WiFi 7 upgrade, is it necessary for enterprise IT to follow suit?

Enterprises want to choose WiFi7 and make major changes in WLAN. In addition to specific product selection, they can also refer to the new features supported by Wi-Fi 7 and make plans to match the needs of the enterprise.

The goal of the Wi-Fi 7 protocol is to increase the throughput rate of WLAN networks to 30Gbps and provide low-latency access guarantees. In order to meet this goal, the entire protocol has made corresponding changes at the PHY layer and MAC layer. Compared with the Wi-Fi 6 protocol, the main technical changes brought by the Wi-Fi 7 protocol are as follows:

1.Supports maximum bandwidth of 320MHz

The license-free spectrum in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency bands is limited and crowded. Existing Wi-Fi will inevitably encounter the problem of low QoS when running emerging applications such as VR/AR. In order to achieve the goal of maximum throughput of no less than 30Gbps, Wi-Fi 7 will continue to introduce the 6GHz frequency band and add new bandwidth modes, including continuous 240MHz, non-continuous 160+80MHz, continuous 320 MHz and non-continuous 160+160MHz.

2.Support Multi-RU mechanism

In Wi-Fi 6, each user can only send or receive frames on the specific assigned RU, which greatly limits the flexibility of spectrum resource scheduling. To solve this problem and further improve spectrum efficiency, Wi-Fi 7 defines a mechanism that allows multiple RUs to be allocated to a single user. Of course, in order to balance the implementation complexity and spectrum utilization, the protocol places certain restrictions on the combination of RUs, that is: small-sized RUs (RUs smaller than 242-Tone) can only be merged with small-sized RUs, and large-sized RUs (RUs greater than or equal to 242-Tone) can only be combined with large-sized RUs, and small-sized RUs and large-sized RUs are not allowed to be mixed.

3.Introducing higher-order 4096-QAM modulation technology

The highest modulation method of Wi-Fi 6 is 1024-QAM, in which the modulation symbols carry 10 bits. In order to further increase the speed, Wi-Fi 7 will introduce 4096-QAM, so that the modulation symbols carry 12 bits. Under the same encoding, Wi-Fi 7's 4096-QAM can achieve a 20% rate increase compared to Wi-Fi 6's 1024-QAM.

4.Introducing Multi-Link multi-link mechanism

In order to achieve efficient utilization 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 defined technologies related to multi-link aggregation, including enhanced multi-link aggregation MAC architecture, multi-link channel access and multi-link transmission and other related technologies.

5.Support more data streams, MIMO function enhancement

In Wi-Fi 7, the number of spatial streams increases from 8 in Wi-Fi 6 to 16, which can theoretically increase the physical transmission rate by more than twice. Supporting more data streams will also bring more powerful features - distributed MIMO, which means that 16 data streams can be provided not by one access point, but by multiple access points simultaneously, which means that multiple APs need to cooperate with each other to work.

6.Supports collaborative scheduling among multiple APs

Currently, within the 802.11 protocol framework, there is actually not much collaboration between APs. Common WLAN functions such as automatic tuning and intelligent roaming are all manufacturer-defined features. The purpose of inter-AP collaboration is only to optimize channel selection, adjust inter-AP loads, etc., to achieve efficient utilization and balanced distribution of radio frequency resources. Collaborative scheduling among multiple APs in Wi-Fi 7, including coordination planning in the time domain and frequency domain between cells, interference coordination between cells, and distributed MIMO, can effectively reduce interference between APs, greatly Improve the utilization of air interface resources.

There are many methods for cooperative scheduling between multiple APs, including C-OFDMA (Coordinated Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access), CSR (Coordinated Spatial Reuse), CBF (Coordinated Beamforming) and JXT (Joint Transmission), etc.

Wi-Fi 7 has been upgraded in almost every aspect, improving WLAN throughput by almost 5 times; it is faster than Wi-Fi 6. In order to build a more interconnected world, the agreement defines modifications to the PHY layer and MAC layer.

Therefore, looking at the application scenarios of Wi-Fi 7, the new features introduced by Wi-Fi 7 will greatly increase the data transmission rate and provide lower latency, and these advantages will be more conducive to the ubiquity of emerging large applications and enterprises. Business expansion.

If your company is deeply involved in scenarios such as video streaming, video/voice conferencing, wireless gaming, real-time collaboration, cloud/edge computing, industrial Internet of Things, immersive AR/VR, interactive telemedicine, etc., the implementation of WiFi7 will bring about a series of Enterprise IT people can prepare for the series of changes in advance.

WIFI 7 CHIP QCN9274 Product---DR9274 6G

Features

■ Qualcomm Atheros QCN9274 for Industrial Grade;

■ Maxim Tx power 22dBm per chain;

■ 4x4  6G MU-MIMO, up to 11530Mbps physical data rate;

■ Support up to 4096-QAM;

■ M.2 connector;

■ PCI Express 3 .0 Interface

Applications

■ Security Surveillance

■ Commercial radio coverage

■ Hotel Wireless application

■ Forest fire protection engineering

■ Country coverage

■ Some special scene application

Email:sales4@wallystech.com