The latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11be or Wi-Fi 7 aims to deliver extremely high throughput (EHT) – three times higher peak throughput than its predecessor Wi-Fi 6E, along with better network
efficiency, deterministic latency, and higher reliability. The high throughput is envisaged to exploit the 6 GHz band which has a shorter propagation range, and is particularly suitable to provide Basic Service Set (BSS) isolation in dense and challenging environments like airports, sports arenas, and large retail complexes. The lower latency and higher reliability are aimed at enabling time-sensitive networking (TSN) use cases. Some TSN use cases are robotic surgery, augmented and virtual reality, online gaming, and cloud computing. Factory and process automation require high reliability, where Wi-Fi 7 needs to guarantee three or more ‘nines’ reliability and sub 10 ms deterministic latency to aim at replacing wired communications.

The 802.11be standard introduces several new features and enhancements to the PHY and MAC layers. The PHY layer is enhanced to support 320 MHz channels, 4096 QAM, 16 spatial streams in
MU MIMO, and a forward compatible frame format. The OFDMA enhancements include multi-RU support with preamble puncturing of single user frames. A more efficient MAC architecture
is introduced where the MAC layer is split into the upper MAC (U-MAC) and lower MAC (L-MAC) to support the use of multiple radio links. Referred to as Multi-link operation (MLO), this feature
enables the AP/client to use multiple links of the same/different bands to improve throughput and reduce latency. Stream classification service (SCS) is introduced to prioritize latency sensitive applications such as real time voice and video. Another MAC feature that attempts to reduce latency is restricted TWT (R-TWT) with TID-to-link mapping.

This primer presents an overview of the above mentioned features in the 802.11be standard along with the benefits and challenges that these features offer. The new use cases that can be brought to reality with the ultra low latency, reliability and extremely high throughput offered by the 802.11be enhancements are elucidated.