Device contention and the battery life of clients is enhanced by a feature called Target Wake Time (TWT), which lets devices remain inactive until it’s their turn to transmit data using a scheduling scheme negotiated with the APs. Because devices can go into an inactive mode the battery life of smart phones, tablets and IoT devices is an underlying benefit. It’s like parking a vehicle in the cell phone waiting area, rather than circling the airport for arrivals. There is less congestion, energy savings and an overall better experience.

MU MIMO) is another way to handle traffic from multiple devices that was originally introduced in 802.11ac. Within 802.11ax, this feature has been enhanced by allowing up to 8 devices to transmit simultaneously using a dedicated channel per device. This allows for large packets such as streaming HD video to be handled more efficiently, while shorter packets from IoT devices and voice traffic would be better handled using OFDMA.

A lot has changed in recent years. The growth and diversity of clients as well as the types of applications and traffic being generated meant wireless standards needed to evolve to keep pace. Latency sensitive voice and video traffic are sharing airspace with IoT devices that are sending small data packets – which will slow down a wireless network.

Based on the same OFDMA radio technology that powers the 4G LTE and 5G NR radios, Aruba Air Slice is a unique Wi-Fi 6 technology designed to optimize user and application experience by providing carrier-grade quality assurance. By dynamically allocating radio resources, such as time, frequency and spatial streams, Aruba Air Slice guarantees performance for latency-sensitive applications such as AR/VR, Zoom and Slack, mobile gaming and real-time IoT applications.

IoT handling is also enhanced with an operating mode for low-power, low-bandwidth devices like sensors, automation and medical devices. This mode will separate these devices from an 802.11ax AP using a 20 MHz-only channel that works in either the 2.4 or 5GHz bands. Similar to providing a dedicated bike lane, but without the worry of low-bandwidth traffic interfering with latency sensitive traffic.

Wi-Fi 6 is the latest standard from the Wi-Fi Alliance based on the 802.11ax protocol, and provides critical capabilities needed for next-generation enterprise requirements.