802.11ax Challenges

Wireless networks have evolved at an alarming rate, at a rate that in just 19 years they have managed to multiply their capacity in terms of bandwidth and users:

Today, when 802.11ax has come to the market from manufacturers such as Ruckus, Cisco, Aruba (others that do not fit in this entry), I would like to review what opportunities that "ax" brings as well as the barriers that will gradually be removed to the users.


Pre-existing:

As in any other technology, there are headaches that must be solved for the sake of the best user experience, among the many challenges that "ax" faces are:

• User density
• traffic speed
• real-time applications
• spectrum saturation

Jumping previous barriers:

One by one all these pre-existences take shape and solution with the introduction of “ax”:

• User density: OFDMA and improvements made to 802.11ax allow more users to use the same set of spectral resources, ie more users on the same spectrum improving connection speed.
• Traffic speed: Theoretically, the maximum capacity is 11Gbps in "ax" and although none of the manufacturers has reached it, there are already manufacturers such as Ruckus that already offer connections in the 5GHz 4.8Gbps band and in the 2.4 GHz band of up to 1.148Gbps. Hopefully, it will be the near future when the theoretical speeds suggested by the standard are reached.
• Real-time applications: Although this limitation depends on many environmental or external variations to the wireless connection, they are directly and indirectly addressed by each of the improvements over the standard, with which we will have more stability in video and audio transmitted in real-time in the network.
• Spectrum saturation: Although 802.11ax works over the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, it makes considerable improvements in channel optimization and the amount of information that travels on the network through 1024-QAM switching, as well as improvements that are made with OFDMA in the use of the spectrum.

802.11ax Challenges

The challenges in the implementation and adoption of the standard are given by the users and their devices, which must take the leap to be compatible and take advantage of the higher connection speeds established by "ax".


Another challenge is the improvement of the previous infrastructure since the UP-Links of the network must have the capacity to support access points that in the worst case may be 5Gps, to transmit to all users connected to the AP the speed and experience expected with 802.11ax