A few days ago, the Wi-Fi 6 IoT chip developed by SHBT Integrated Circuit Technology Group took the lead in passing the Wi-Fi 6 certification test of the International Wi-Fi Alliance ("Wi-Fi Alliance"), becoming the world's first Wi-Fi 6 support IoT chip. This chip redefines the Wi-Fi connection ecology of the original IoT application and opens a new chapter for the Internet of Things to enter the Wi-Fi 6 era.
Wi-Fi application overview
With the advent of the Internet of Everything era, tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of smart devices are connected to the cloud every year. In the application of wireless LAN, Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) technology almost has a monopoly. According to statistics from the Wi-Fi Alliance, there are currently more than 10 billion Wi-Fi devices used for wireless connections worldwide, and more than half of the data traffic is carried and implemented through Wi-Fi. Because Wi-Fi technology has the characteristics of short-distance transmission and high speed, it is the first to realize large-scale applications on consumer electronic terminal devices such as mobile phones and notebook computers, and has gradually penetrated into application scenarios such as the Internet of Things and virtual reality.
At the same time, in the past 20 years, Wi-Fi technical standards have continued to evolve, and the direction of evolution is to continue to increase bandwidth and increase the rate of information transmission. From the original 3rd generation 802.11.ag can only transmit text files, only suitable for sending and receiving emails, to the 4th generation 802.11n can be used to browse the web, to the 5th generation 802.11ac can be used for smooth video playback. However, any previous generation of Wi-Fi has an inherent application limitation, which is the problem of transmission bandwidth when multiple devices coexist. It was not until the Wi-Fi Alliance launched the latest standard Wi-Fi 6 that this problem was satisfactorily resolved.
Wi-Fi6 technical characteristics
Wi-Fi 6 introduces wireless communication technologies such as OFDMA, MU-MIMO, 1024QAM, BSS Coloring, TWT, etc., to completely solve the problem of communication bandwidth utilization efficiency when multi-users coexist, and at the same time achieve large capacity, high rate and low latency. Features, these advantages and characteristics, will greatly promote the wide application of Wi-Fi 6 technology in the field of Internet of Things.
1. OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access): The wireless channel is divided into multiple sub-channels (sub-carriers) in the frequency domain to form multiple time-frequency resource blocks. User data is carried on each resource block without occupying The entire channel can realize simultaneous transmission of multiple users in each time period, thereby improving efficiency and reducing waiting time delay in queuing.
2. MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output): Multiple-input multiple-output technology has become one of the key technologies of the next generation of wireless communication systems. Compared with single-user MIMO, multi-user MIMO can effectively increase system throughput and communication efficiency.
3. 1024 QAM: QAM is quadrature amplitude modulation, the process of converting data signals into radio waves for transmission. The higher the QAM level, the more data contained in the wireless signal transmitted each time. Wi-Fi 5 supports 256 QAM, while Wi-Fi 6 supports 1024 QAM, and the data transmission rate is further improved.
4. BSS Coloring: BSS Coloring is a method to solve the problem of increasing spatial reuse rate due to overlapping basic service sets. By adding BSS Color to the data header, data can be transmitted on the same channel without mutual interference.
5. TWT: Wi-Fi 6 adopts TWT timing wake-up technology to define different wake-up times for each terminal. Only the terminal device enters the working state after receiving its own wake-up information, and the rest of the time is in the dormant state, which is significant Reduce system power consumption.
Wi-Fi 6 market outlook
It is precisely because of the obvious performance improvement of Wi-Fi 6 in terms of transmission bandwidth, delay, connection density, etc., its scene adaptability is also significantly enhanced, and the market capacity will grow rapidly.
According to Gartner's estimates, the Wi-Fi 6 market will reach US$22 billion by 2025, with an average annual compound growth rate of 114%. In the next few years, wireless products based on Wi-Fi 6 will quickly enter the market and become a key force in wireless connection applications.