IEEE 802.11 Ax

IEEE 802.
11ax High Efficiency WLANs
Student name: Nour AlGabele

Contents
Introduction..............................................................................................................................2
OFDMA.....................................................................................................................................3
Main Features of 802.11ax.......................................................................................................3
Modulation...............................................................................................................................5
PHY Frame Format....................................................................................................................6
Conclusion................................................................................................................................7
Reference.................................................................................................................................8
1
Introduction
IEEE 802.11ax, officially marketed by the Wi-Fi Alliance as Wi-Fi 6 (2.4
GHz and 5 GHz) and Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz), is an IEEE standard for wireless
local-area networks (WLANs) and the successor of 802.11ac. It is also
known as High Efficiency Wi-Fi, for the overall improvements to Wi-Fi 6
clients under dense environments. It is designed to operate in license-
exempt bands between 1 and 7.125 GHz, including the 2.4 and 5 GHz
bands already in common use as well as the much wider 6 GHz band
(5.925–7.125 GHz in the US).
The main goal of this standard is enhancing throughput-per-area in high-

density scenarios, such as corporate offices, shopping malls and dense
residential apartments. While the nominal data rate improvement against
802.11ac is only 37%, the overall throughput improvement (over an
entire network) is 300% (hence High Efficiency). This also translates to
75% lower latency.
The quadrupling of overall throughput is made possible by a higher

spectral efficiency. The key feature underpinning 802.11ax is orthogonal
frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), which is equivalent to
cellular technology applied into Wi-Fi. Other improvements on spectrum
utilization are better power-control methods to avoid interference with
neighboring networks, higher order 1024-QAM, up-link direction added
with the down-link of MIMO and MU-MIMO to further increase
throughput, as well as dependability improvements of power
consumption and security protocols such as Target Wake Time and
WPA3.
2
OFDMA
In the previous amendment of 802.11 (namely 802.11ac), multi-user
MIMO has been introduced, which is a spatial multiplexing technique.
MU-MIMO allows the access point to form beams towards each client,
while transmitting information simultaneously. By doing so, the
interference between clients is reduced, and the overall throughput is
increased, since multiple clients can receive data at the same time. With
802.11ax, a similar multiplexing is introduced in the frequency domain,
namely OFDMA. With this technique, multiple clients are assigned with
different Resource Units in the available spectrum. By doing so, an
80 MHz channel can be split into multiple Resource Units, so that
multiple clients receive different types of data over the same spectrum,
simultaneously. In order to have enough subcarriers to support the
requirements of OFDMA, four times as many subcarriers are needed than
by the 802.11ac standard. In other words, for 20, 40, 80 and 160 MHz
channels, there are 64, 128, 256 and 512 subcarriers in the 802.11ac
standard, but 256, 512, 1,024 and 2,048 subcarriers in the 802.11ax
standard. Since the available bandwidths have not changed and the
number of subcarriers increases by a factor of four, the subcarrier spacing
is reduced by the same factor, which introduces four times longer OFDM
symbols: for 802.11ac the duration of an OFDM symbol is 3.2
microseconds, and for 802.11ax it is 12.8 microseconds (both without
guard intervals).
Main Features of 802.11ax

Similarly to the previous amendments that improve the nominal bit rates,
802.11ax contains a new PHY protocol with higher modulation and
3
coding schemes. In contrast to 802.11ac, 802.11ax does not increase the
number of the MIMO spatial streams and does not widen the channel.
Thus the nominal data rates are increased up to 9.6 Gbps, which is just
37% higher than that of 802.11ac (rather small compared to the 10x
growth of 802.11n or 802.11ac!). The desired increase of the user
throughput is achieved by more efficient spectrum usage.
The key feature of 802.11ax is the adoption of an OFDMA approach, an

approach widely used in cellular networks, but brand new in Wi-Fi. The
rationale is that the very wide channels (80 MHz, 80+80 MHz and 160
MHz) introduced by 802.11ac suffer from frequency selective
interference, which significantly impairs the practically achievable rates.
With OFDMA, adjacent subcarriers (tones) are grouped together into a
resource unit (RU) and a sender can choose the best RU for each
particular receiver, which actually results in higher Signal-to-
Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR), Modulation and Coding Scheme
(MCS) and throughput. Moreover, since the efficiency of high data rates
degrades when a STA has only few data to transmit, advanced
aggregation techniques aimed to reduce channel access, acknowledgment
(ACK) and preamble-induced overhead become useless. Allocating
narrow RUs for such STAs is an efficient remedy. According to the latest
TGax investigations, OFDMA provides a 6 times higher throughput than
legacy DCF, see Fig. 1.
4
Fig. 1. OFDMA gain in the overlapped network scenario.
Modulation
The 802.11ax PHY inherits several aspects from its predecessor
802.11ac. Similarly to 802.11ac, it is based on Orthogonal Frequency-
Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and supports operations in 20 MHz, 40
MHz, 80 MHz, 80+80 MHz and 160 MHz channels.
To increase the number of tones, which is favorable for OFDMA, TGax

has quadrupled the duration of the OFDM symbols used for the PHY
payload up to 12.8 μs. Such long OFDM symbols are more resilient to
the inter-user jitter inherent in outdoor scenarios, which is very important
for the UL MU transmission which may be simultaneously performed by
several users. Moreover, longer symbols permit to reduce the overhead
due to Guard Intervals (GI). Indeed, based on the channel conditions, an
802.11ax device can separate OFDM symbols by the GI selected among
the values {0.8 μs, 1.6 μs and 3.2 μs}, which allows the reduction of
5
overhead down to 6%, opposed to the 12-25% GI overhead in the
802.11ac standard.
The 802.11ax amendment also introduces new modulation techniques in

addition to legacy BPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM, and 256-QAM. The first
one is an optional 1024-QAM, which may be exploited in indoor
scenarios with very good channel conditions - i.e., a high SINR. Together
with forward error correction codes (convolutional or low-density parity-
check) — which have code rates of 1/2, 2/3, 3/4 and 5/6 — these
modulations generate a palette of data rates with a maximum of 9.6 Gbps.
Such a high rate is achieved when data is transmitted at the highest HE-
MCS11 with a code rate of 5/6 in a 160 MHz or 80+80 MHz channel
with 8 spatial streams and a GI of 0.8 μs.
PHY Frame Format

TGax defines 4 types of PHY frames (referred to as PPDU, PHY Protocol
Data Unit, following the amendment): for the Single User (SU)
transmission, for the extended range SU transmission, for the DL MU
transmission and for the UL MU transmission. These four different frame
types leverage a baseline frame structure extended with selected fields
specialized for the different frame types (Fig. 2). The main feature of the
DL MU transmission is that the frame contains a common preamble
describing which tones a particular receiver shall decode to obtain its part
of the Data field. Similarly, for the UL MU transmission, the preamble is
common and it is emitted by all the STAs. Then, each STA sends its own
part of the Data field using a predefined set of tones.
For all the frame types, the preamble is duplicated in every 20 MHz
subchannel within the transmission band and consists of two parts: the
legacy part and the HE one, see Fig. 3 . While the former is included for
6
backward compatibility, the latter one provides signaling for the new
802.11ax functionality and it can be decoded only by 802.11ax devices.
The legacy part contains training fields, which synchronize the

transmitter and the receiver, and the legacy signal field (L-SIG), which
describes the parameters of the rest of the frame. Specifically, L-SIG
allows the calculation of the frame duration. Even though the legacy
devices decode the rest of the frame with errors, they consider the
channel as busy, even if the signal strength is too low.
Fig. 2: 802.11ax PHY frame format
Fig.3: Legacy preamble and HE-SIG-A are duplicated on each 20 MHz sub-channel.
Conclusion
The 802.11ax amendment aims at challenging the densification of Wi-Fi
deployments, by targeting a significant increase in the throughput density.
In other words, it targets a greater throughput-per-area opposed to “just”
the absolute throughput increase of past amendments via more advanced
modulation and coding schemes. As comprehensively discussed in this
7
tutorial, the new 802.11ax amendment, which has now reached a
relatively stable version, introduces significant novelties and departs from
the past Wi-Fi versions significantly.
Reference
A Tutorial on IEEE 802.11ax High, Efficiency WLANs, Evgeny Khorov,
Anton Kiryanov, Andrey Lyakhov, and Giuseppe Bianchi

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IEEE 802.

11ax High Efficiency WLANs

Student name: Nour AlGabele

The main goal of this standard is enhancing throughput-per-area in high-

The quadrupling of overall throughput is made possible by a higher

Main Features of 802.11ax

The key feature of 802.11ax is the adoption of an OFDMA approach, an

To increase the number of tones, which is favorable for OFDMA, TGax

The 802.11ax amendment also introduces new modulation techniques in

PHY Frame Format

The legacy part contains training fields, which synchronize the

Fig. 2: 802.11ax PHY frame format

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