IT House January 6 news that the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the Wi-Fi 6 2nd Edition standard (Wi-Fi 6 Release 2). It improves power management for uplinks and all supported frequency bands (2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz) for routers and devices in homes and workplaces, as well as smart home IoT devices.
First, Wi-Fi 6 Version 2 adds support for uplink multi-user multi-input, multi-output (multi-user MIMO) to provide smoother streaming services and video conferencing, faster uploads, and more reliable gaming.
With nearly 2 billion Wi-Fi 6 devices on the market by 2022, Wi-Fi today supports higher device density, more bandwidth-hungry applications, and a surge in uplink data demand in residential and enterprise environments.
Wi-Fi 6 version 2 adds support for uplink multi-user MIMO, enabling devices to upload content to an access point (AP) at the same time. Wi-Fi networks support more uplink activity, users often upload work documents and videos to social media sites, and the trend towards uplink data consumption will increase further as more IoT devices send data to the cloud over Wi-Fi.
Uplink multiuser MIMO improves network performance and reduces latency in video conferencing, uploading documents, and any other mission-critical application that requires greater uplink capacity.
IT House understands that Wi-Fi 6 Version 2 is also smarter in terms of power management. It supports new low-power and sleep modes, especially favoring battery-powered smart home devices.
New low-power and sleep mode enhancements—including broadcast target wake-up time (TWT), extended sleep time, and dynamic multi-user space multiplexing power saving (SMPS)—support power optimization for multiple battery-powered devices.
These three features allow multiple devices to receive extended sleep times, allow specific "wake-up" times for transmitted data, and enable dynamic shutdown of redundant receive chains to optimize power consumption for Wi-Fi 6 version 2 networks. Power management capabilities benefit smart home, smart city, and industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, and enable Wi-Fi to further its role in delivering IoT applications.