Understanding and Mitigating the Impact of Wi-Fi 6E Interference on Ultra-Wideband Communications and Ranging

The introduction of the Wi-Fi 6E standard operating in the 6 GHz frequency band is a serious threat for IoT systems based on ultra-wideband technology, as they share portions of the same spectrum. Wi-Fi 6E devices can in fact support channel bandwidths up to 160 MHz and operate at a much higher transmission power compared to ultra-wideband devices, which may lead to severe coexitence issues and degraded performance. However, whether and to which extent the performance of ultra-wide band systems worsens due to Wi-Fi 6E interference has not been investigated in detail yet. In this paper, we fill this gap and study how Wi-Fi 6E traffic affects ultra-wideband performance. Our experiments on a large-scale testbed demonstrate that Wi-Fi 6E transmissions may largely disrupt ultra-wideband communications and decrease the accuracy as well as the precision of ranging measurements, with significant consequences on the efficiency of localization systems. We investigate in detail the root causes for the degraded performance and derive empirical observations that can be used to design countermeasures mitigating the impact of Wi-Fi 6E interference. These include, among others, an optimal selection of physical layer settings, as well as the use of a tight synchronization to prevent a false detection of Wi-Fi 6E traffic as ultra-wide band frames and an overshooting of the radio's automatic gain control. We further devise a technique to detect the presence of Wi-Fi 6E traffic and postpone ultra-wideband transmissions accordingly. Our experiments demonstrate that these countermeasures effectively mitigate the impact of Wi-Fi 6E interference on the performance of ultra-wide band systems.