Measuring Wi-Fi 6E Performance Gain

Introduction

Benchmarking Wi-Fi 6E access point (AP) performance requires a strong handle on factors that influence the outcome, including client scale, mix, and capabilities; traffic; quality of service; and SNR / RSSI. Modeling real-world deployments in the lab and pushing APs to their limits just got more complex with Wi-Fi 6E and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). Test systems relying solely on real clients or commercial chipsets often fall short of creating enough scale and variations so that Wi-Fi networks are not tested to their full capacity.

Simulation is just one part of the story; accurate latency measurements are critical to understanding system issues. Wi-Fi 6E promises to improve user experience by lowering latency through efficient spectrum use with OFDMA concurrent clients. With ever-decreasing latency budgets, the AP’s scheduler plays a critical role in managing client concurrency for the best latency results. You need a sophisticated test system to simulate clients at scale to validate the fine balance between concurrency and latency.

Use Case Summary

Here is an example of a scalability test of OFDMA in downstream traffic. This test starts with four clients and gradually increases to 64 clients. Results include latencies and percentage of HE-MU (multiuser OFDMA) traffic. The following results compare two models:

AP#1 maintained a good latency of 6.9 msec even with 64 clients. It did so by scheduling four to eight concurrent clients (or RU, resource units) only.

AP#2 experienced a very long latency of 394 msec as the number of clients reached 64. While this AP scheduler maintained more concurrent clients with 36 RU, it unexpectedly resulted in a longer latency.

This use case illustrates how scalability can validate the AP scheduler’s performance in maintaining client concurrency to achieve optimal latency, as it did with AP#1, or miss it, as in the case with AP#2.

Solution Overview

Keysight WaveTest 6E is a next-generation test tool that can simulate multiuser OFDMA at scale to fully validate the functionality and performance gain promised by Wi-Fi 6E technology. With full client control testing, WaveTest 6E provides repeatable results. All tests are automatable and easy to configure. To accelerate development, WaveTest 6E provides extensive visibility and debugging.