Next Generation of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi

3Wi-Fi Specifications

3.1. Overview and taxonomy

Since the development of IEEE 802.11 legacy version in 1997 until 2023, there have been more than 50 amendments, with several more task groups currently working on developing newer amendments. Not all have had large influences on the current widespread usage of Wi-Fi, but some have provided important improvements in various aspects to suggest usage of Wi-Fi in many directions. The most comprehensive and up-to-date IEEE 802.11 standard is IEEE 802.11-2020 (IEEE SA 2020), approved in the February of 2021. This latest version includes up to 802.11ba, while task groups of project from 802.11bb to 802.11bk are ongoing (with the exclusion of 802.11bd, which has been finalized in March 2023). In this chapter, variety of these amendments will be categorized based on their main objectives and explained in detail to aid readers in understanding the trend of their development.

3.1.1. Summary and taxonomy of PHY-related amendments

The physical layer amendments generally have the objective of increasing the throughput of Wi-Fi based networks. Usually, in the physical layer, this can be done through four main strategies:

• Change the operating frequency, for example, to a higher frequency which allows higher channel capacity as well as reduce interference from overlapping channels.
• Change the method of modulation, for example, utilization of OFDM, which increases the utilization of the channel bandwidth in a more efficient and flexible way. ...