Comparison Analysis and Prediction of Modern Wi-Fi Standards

The application of Wi-Fi technology is everywhere in modern life. More than 1 billion Wi-Fi access points link nearly 100 billion Internet devices together, enabling millions of applications to approach anyone from anywhere. Wi-Fi technology allows various electronic devices to exchange data and connect to the Internet via radio waves. Wireless local area network (WLAN) 802.11 standards, which were developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is the basis of modern Wi-Fi standards. Since the birth of the WLAN standard, with the progress of signal modulation method and the introduction of advanced antenna technology, the performance of Wi-Fi has been obviously optimized, and the maximum data transmission speed is of constant increase. However, even though it was updated to the latest IEEE 802.11ax version, Wi-Fi technology still had shortcomings, such as frequency band congestion. This paper comparatively analyzed various versions of the IEEE 802.11 standard and predicted the future direction of wireless communication technology to tackle this issue. Firstly, this paper analyzes the three physical layer modulation and coding methods of the Wi-Fi physical layer to exhibited the diverse characteristics of Wi-Fi standards applications under those technologies. In addition, we comparatively analyzed the strength and weaknesses of disparate Wi-Fi versions due to modification in modulation and coding technologies. We have noticed a new technology called Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) which uses visible light to transmit information wirelessly, and it can replace Wi-Fi technology for wireless data transmission. The result is that through the comparative analysis of different Wi-Fi versions, the existing shortcomings of current Wi-Fi will be displayed. In the future, Li-Fi can overcome the weaknesses of current Wi-Fi. Furthermore, coordinating Li-Fi with Wi-Fi could be a promising approach.