The Technology Behind Wi-Fi 7 and its Testing Challenges

Wi-Fi 7 offers unmatched wireless performance for users and businesses, with high speed and low latency enhancing the broadband experience. It expands on Wi-Fi 6 features and introduces significantly more complexity with 4K QAM, multi-link operations, and the increased focus on performance and quality of service. However, realizing these benefits requires translating technical specs into tangible user experiences at home or work. These new capabilities point to the future of Wi-Fi, where new use cases are emerging, and it gets used in completely new ways like AR/VR, mesh, or internet of things (IoT). But there are challenges with these new use cases, and if left untested, we leave a lot on the table, and expected customer benefits will not be realized.

Some new capabilities include providing guaranteed and deterministic latency with OFDMA restricted service periods; increasing throughput, enhancing reliability, and improving latency and load balancing with multi-link operations and the allocation of multiple OFDMA resource units to each user; and reducing latency by dynamically assigning individual data packets to links as channel conditions change.