IEEE 802.11be Wi-Fi 7: New Challenges and Opportunities

With the emergence of 4k/8k video, the throughput requirement of video delivery will keep grow to tens of Gbps. Other new high-throughput and low-latency video applications including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and online gaming, are also proliferating. Due to the related stringent requirements, supporting these applications over wireless local area network (WLAN) is far beyond the capabilities of the new WLAN standard - IEEE 802.11ax. To meet these emerging demands, the IEEE 802.11 will release a new amendment standard IEEE 802.11be - Extremely High Throughput (EHT), also known as Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi) 7. This article provides the comprehensive survey on the key medium access control (MAC) layer techniques and physical layer (PHY) techniques being discussed in the EHT task group, including the channelization and tone plan, multiple resource units (multi-RU) support, 4096 quadrature amplitude modulation (4096-QAM), preamble designs, multiple link operations (e.g., multi-link aggregation and channel access), multiple input multiple output (MIMO) enhancement, multiple access point (multi-AP) coordination (e.g., multi-AP joint transmission), enhanced link adaptation and retransmission protocols (e.g., hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ)). This survey covers both the critical technologies being discussed in EHT standard and the related latest progresses from worldwide research. Besides, the potential developments beyond EHT are discussed to provide some possible future research directions for WLAN.