IEEE 802.11ax
IEEE 802.11ax standardizes a WLAN that has a much higher data rate than 802.11ac, namely more than 2 Gbit/s. Whereby data rates of over 10 Gbit/s and transfer rates of 1.4 GByte/s have already been achieved under laboratory conditions.
802.11ax is designed to transmit in frequency ranges between 1 GHz and 7 GHz. As the successor technology to 802.11n and 802.11ac, it transmits in the frequency ranges at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. The latter is the UNII band, which stands for Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII). In this frequency band, more bandwidth is available for the 80 MHz and 160 MHz channels.
802.11ax uses Multi-User MIMO( MU-MIMO) in the uplink and can transmit four spatial streams simultaneously, each of which is multiplexed using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access( OFDMA). With this technique, the transmission channel can be divided into many sub-channels operating at slightly different frequencies with carrier signals offset at 90°. In 802.11ax, there are 980 data channels. As a modulation scheme, 802.11ax uses quadrature amplitude modulation according to 1024QAM. This signal coding allows 10 bits per amplitude jump to be transmitted. Data can be secured using the Wireless Protected Architecture (WPA3).
With these techniques, 802.11ax achieves a data rate of 4.8 Gbit/s for one stream at a bandwidth of 160 MHz. With two streams, it is 9.6 Gbit/s, and with four streams, cumulative data rates of up to 19.2 Gbit/s result. In the WiFi numbering system, the IEEE standard 802.11ax corresponds to WiFi 6.