Wi-Fi progress continues on realizing future 5G, internet of things capabilities.
Editor’s Note: With 2017 virtually upon us, RCR Wireless News has gathered predictions from across the mobile telecommunications space on what they expect to see in the new year.
Predictions are generally worth what you pay for them, so you can weigh mine accordingly. In fact, as humans we’re quite bad at predicting the future, though we enjoy the “happy accident” when we’re correct.
When it comes to Institute of Electric and Electrical Engineers 802.11-related technologies known as Wi-Fi, the past 25 years have established that we’ve consistently underestimated the market’s ability to find unforeseen and innovative use cases that has made it nearly globally ubiquitous for myriad applications.
That said, as a technologist and chair of the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Group, I’m committed to a roadmap with reasonably well-considered due dates for bringing new capabilities to market. So I can speak with relative assurance to what’s in store for 2017. And, perhaps just as interesting to readers of RCR Wireless News, I can pull back the curtain on work behind the scenes in 2017 that will support the burgeoning “internet of things” as well as nascent “5G” technologies between 2017 and 2020.
In the short run
Completed in 2012, the IEEE 802.11ad standard runs on 60 GHz unlicensed spectrum and provides high throughput at multigigabit speeds for in-room coverage. This capability may well have its first real day in the sun in 2017, but it has been thus far slow to gain commercial traction, perhaps because it requires users to buy both ends of the link. Its use cases vary from connecting a docking station to peripherals in, say, a wireless home office environment for convenience, to applications in data centers for wireless reach within a rack-mounted environment for cost savings on copper or fiber optic cabling. When will commercialization lead to hockey stick-like growth in IEEE 802.11ad’s use? That I cannot predict with certainty.
In 2016, the IEEE Standards Association rolled IEEE Std 802.11ac and IEEE Std 802.11ad back into the fundamental IEEE 802.11-2016 standard. At the same time the opportunity was taken to support more accurate and high throughput indoor location-based applications, which may well also make a splash in 2017. This will provide a jump from the current five meter accuracy to two to three meters. With support for location, Wi-Fi moves from offering mere connectivity to providing a service.
Two resulting use cases come to mind. One is an in-store ability to identify and track shoppers to push timely or locational vouchers for bargains. Mashed up with data analytics, this could allow merchants to also understand a specific shopper’s interests and preferences, but that level of scrutiny may well bring review by policy makers. The other application would be “geo-fencing,” or the ability to limit confidential content to devices that are physically within a secure perimeter. This has obvious, immediate implications for sharing data on mobile devices in public or private sector meetings.
IEEE P802.11az is in the pipeline and it promises to further improve the accuracy of location-based positioning to several centimeters over 60 GHz unlicensed spectrum. The telecom industry used to talk about “last mile” connectivity; now we’re talking “last meter” and, eventually, “last centimeter.” I confess I’m not sure what use cases will emerge from such exact positioning, but rest assured they will indeed happen.
The IoT is already here
Most RCR Wireless News readers are aware that, for instance, mobile devices can communicate with your smart thermostat and other home energy management devices to remotely control your heating or air conditioning. That’s a form of the IoT here today and likely to expand tomorrow, supported by IEEE 802.11 LAN capabilities. How will “things” talk to each other and to the internet? Any and all IEEE 802.11 variants will serve to connect them in various ways.
As more products and services hit the market, the value of connectivity increases, according to Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the value of a communications network depends on the square of the number of users. In other words, the more people adopt IoT-related technologies, the more value they will derive, and this progression will build on itself. A few IEEE 802.11-related, device-to-device or device-to-internet applications present themselves, such as coordinating the powering of devices and systems for energy efficiency and demand response in smart buildings, cities and grids.
Other Wi-Fi amendments with implications for IoT include IEEE 802.11ah-2016, which may emerge in product in 2017. It offers extended range and low-energy demands and will utilize sub-1 GHz unlicensed frequency bands and is well suited to connecting a plethora of sensors in IoT applications.
Another major development is the so-called “wake-up radio” capability of IEEE P802.11ba, in the pipeline, but not in time for 2017. Soon enough, the “things” in IoT will utilize two radios to ensure both low latency and energy efficiency within a device – two radio characteristics typically at odds. One radio will efficiently “wake up” a device or “thing” and the other radio, once triggered to awake, will handle the ensuing low-latency data communications.
5G: an actual game changer
The so-called 5G presents a set of heterogeneous requirements that include machine-to-machine, highly mobile devices, high throughput and reliability and low latency. These disparate demands ensure that no single system can do it all, unlike how 4G can rely on a single chipset. So 802.11 will complement and support 5G in specific areas such as making efficient use of unlicensed spectrum. For instance, IEEE P802.11ax covers a range of abilities, including spectral efficiency, with greater than 10 gigabit per second throughput, but it will take several years to appear in commercial products.
When will consumers actually see 5G? Various players working on it have committed to demonstrating its abilities at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. For those of us toiling to a schedule, that’s a mighty tight timeframe for such a revolutionary leap ahead.
To summarize, readers will likely see new IEEE 802.11 capabilities hitting the market in 2017, with many new ones emerging between then and 2020. Still, IEEE 802.11’s morphing capabilities have defied past predictions and surprised us all. And we all know that market uptake of new technologies is dependent on myriad factors. So when it comes to predictions, caveat emptor!
Adrian Stephens is a consultant, specializing in standards development. He is the IEEE 802.11 chair, and is a member of the IEEE Standards Association Standards Board. He was previously a senior principal engineer in Intel’s Next Generation & Standards group (part of the Platform Engineering Group) where his job focus was on developing IEEE 802.11 standards.
