802.11ax Series

It’s 802.11ax season, or otherwise known as Wi-Fi 6. We have been recording a series of episodes highlighting various sections of the 802.11ax draft. We dive into the details and explain them to you here on the podcast. We cover things such as BSS Color, OFDMA, subcarriers, and more. This page will update as soon as new 802.11ax episodes are released. To make them easier to listen to, we have filtered just the 802.11ax series on this page. We hope you can learn a lot from these episodes.

CTS 159: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) Overview

In this episode, we provide an overview of many parts contained in 802.11ax. It’s meant to provide a quick update as to what is coming in 802.11ax. You can expect that we will cover these items in future episodes.

CTS 160: 802.11ax OFDMA Resource Units

A new way of handling transmissions for Wi-Fi is by turning OFDM into multi-user by using OFDMA. It’s borrowed from the cellular world and adds efficiency to Wi-Fi. This is one of the fundamental concepts to understand for 802.11ax.

CTS 161: 802.11ax BSS Coloring

Another new concept to 802.11ax is this idea of using a BSS Color. It’s used for dense environments and allows for OBSS. Kind of looks like RXSOP. There’s actually no colors used. It’s just 1s and 0s.

CTS 162: 802.11ax OFDMA Subcarriers

With OFDMA, the subcarriers are much different compared to 802.11ac. There are a lot more subcarriers for multi-user OFDM. More transmissions to send and receive across a channel width. François goes into the details of subcarriers for OFDMA for this episode.

CTS 164: 802.11ax Target Wake Time

All the current power saving mechanisms defined today remain usable with ax. In addition, the 802.11ax draft defines a new mechanism called Target Wake Time or TWT. Target wake time (TWT) is used to help minimize contention between clients and reduce the amount of time a client in power save mode to be awake.

CTS 166: 802.11ax HE Channel Access

It’s not all-new ways of thinking about channel access but 802.11ax does add some complexity. We are now dealing with multi-access, TXOP, BSS coloring which complicates the channel access process.

We have more episodes in the hopper… reading the draft takes time. Interpreting and understanding takes longer…