Wi-Fi looks a little more like LTE in Qualcomm’s 802.11ax chipsets
Wi-Fi that works is mission critical to many enterprises, and most people also rely on Wi-Fi to stay connected at home. But Wi-Fi that works today may disappoint tomorrow, if the number or type of devices on the network increases.
“The industry is going to see a tremendous amount of congestion,” said Qualcomm senior VP Rahul Patel, general manager of the company’s connectivity business unit. “The networks are going to get denser, and for the consumer it’s extremely important that we focus on addressing the benefits of high utilization of capacity.”
Capacity utilization is addressed in 802.11ax, the IEEE’s next-generation Wi-Fi protocol, and Qualcomm expects to be first to market with chips that support the new standard in both routers and clients. The company brought its cellular expertise to bear in designing the new Wi-Fi chips by building in higher order modulation and advanced scheduling to support more capacity on Wi-Fi networks.
Right now Wi-Fi users compete with one another to send data in the uplink, but Qualcomm’s 802.11ax solution schedules users so that they don’t clash with each other. The company said this managed approach results in better resource utilization and an impressive increase in efficiency.
Three new technologies for Wi-Fi
Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access is a part of the LTE standard, and now Qualcomm is bringing it to Wi-Fi. Today’s Wi-Fi routers use time-division multiplexing, meaning that service different clients using the same frequency at different times. Frequency division enables the spectrum band itself to be divided so that multiple clients can be served at the same time.
“If you have a 20 megahertz client and a 40 megahertz client and you have 80 megahertz channel to work with, then the channel is going to get sliced up into bits of 20 megahertz and 40 megahertz and simultaneously support those clients,” said Patel.
802.11ax also brings higher order modulation to Wi-Fi. Qualcomm’s chipsets use 1024-state quadrature amplitude modulation. Patel said the higher speeds of 1024 QAM will make a significant difference in both performance and throughput for Wi-Fi networks.
Finally, 802.11ax supports longer battery life for Wi-Fi access points and user devices through a technology called target wake-up time. It allows devices to negotiate when and how often they will wake up to send or receive data, so devices are not active when they don’t need to be.
Two new SoCs
Qualcomm said its new router system-on-chip, the IPQ8074, will be able to deliver up to 4.8 gigabits per second. More importantly, Patel said, the chipset enables the capacity needed to support that speed.
The IPQ8074 offers up to 4 times the capacity of today’s Wi-Fi chips, Qualcomm said. It is a 12-stream device, supporting eight 80 MHz streams in the 5 GHz band and four streams in the 2.4 GHz band. It features multiple-user multiple-input multiple-output in both the uplink and downlink.
The chipset uses self-organizing network technology and is designed to reduce harmful interference in dense areas with many overlapping Wi-Fi access points. Patel said that because of scheduling, the IPQ8074 routers can improve the performance of all Wi-Fi access points in an area, even those that are not 802.11ax.
The chipset’s radio and baseband are integrated with a quad-core 64-bit A53 CPU and dual-core network accelerator. It was designed using a 14-nanometer process.
Qualcomm’s 802.11ax client SoC is called the QCA6290. The company said it offers up to a 4-fold increase in user throughput compared to current state-of-the-art Wi-Fi chipsets. Qualcomm said it achieves peak speeds of up to 1.8 Gbps by combining the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, and supporting 1024 QAM. In addition, the QCA6290 is expected to reduce power consumption by two thirds, Qualcomm said.
Ready this year
Qualcomm expects to sample the IPQ8074 and QCA6290 in the first half of 2017. Patel said IPQ8074 routers could be on the market this year.
“I would not be surprised if in the second half of 2017 we see some router platforms coming out because that’s the sweet spot, that’s the season when I know router manufacturers in the U.S. want to launch new products, at back-to-school or at Christmas,” he said.
“We are excited about the potential impact that 802.11ax will have in the home and small businesses,” said David Henry, senior vice president, home networking, at NETGEAR. “802.11ax is not an incremental upgrade to keep pace with today’s demands. The technology will reset the bar for what matters most in networking.”
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