A First Look at Wi-Fi 6 in Action: Throughput, Latency, Energy Efficiency, and Security

We present the performance measurement of Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax). Our experiments focus on multi-client scenarios. The results reveal the impact of the new channel access mechanisms (i.e., OFDMA and TWT) on spectrum efficiency, latency, energy consumption, and security. (i) A comparison with the legacy CSMA/CA scheme shows that the commodity Wi-Fi 6 achieves 3× overall throughput and dramatically reduces the latency (5×) when coexisting with the legacy Wi-Fi network. (ii) However, the current OFDMA implementation significantly increases the power consumption (6×), implying a design tradeoff between the gain of throughput/latency and the cost of energy consumption. We believe that our findings provide critical insights for the scheduling algorithm design, power optimization, and security protection of the next-generation WLANs. The full paper is provided in \cite10.1145/3579451.