Wi-Fi 6E Performance Evaluation in Industrial Scenarios

Abstract: As Industry 4.0 keeps approaching, the quality of data communication in industrial scenarios is increasingly important to support a high degree of automation and intelligence in factories. Wi-Fi 6E, the latest advanced wireless local-area network standard, comes with new 6 GHz unlicensed spectrum, a new access method named Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access, and even more features. Accordingly, Wi-Fi 6E can be a promising candidate technology for an industrial wireless network. To fulfill industrial applications, Wi-Fi 6E is challenged with high communication requirements and a massive number of devices to support. Since the cutting-edge Wi- Fi 6E systems have not been widely deployed practically, simulations are required to evaluate the performance of Wi-Fi 6E in industrial scenarios. Based on an event-based simulator from Ericsson, we performed simulations covering not only single access point scenarios with periodic traffic, but also scenarios where multiple applications and generations of Wi-Fi systems coexist. Finally, a large-area industry scenario with frequency planning applied was evaluated. Through simulation results and analysis, we conclude that Wi-Fi 6E performs well in most of our tested scenarios. Compared to legacy Wi-Fi 5,Wi-Fi 6E performs better when subject to uplink traffic, and is more suitable for handling a massive number of devices or high packet rate traffic due to its unique multi-user accessing. However, Wi-Fi 6E can have poor performance when performing multi-user transmission with applications that have complex traffic and millisecond-level latency requirement. In some cases, Wi-Fi 6E performs worse than Wi-Fi 5 while handling multiple applications whose packet sizes vary a lot. Moreover, with the increase in factory scales, Wi-Fi 6E can have a magnificent performance drop, almost 100%, through the regulatory requirements in the new 6 GHz unlicensed band.