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

Abstract

This paper presents a first-of-its-kind performance measurement of Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) using real experiments. Our experiments focus on multi-client scenarios. The results reveal the impact of the new channel access mechanisms (i.e., OFDMA and TWT) on the spectrum efficiency, energy consumption, latency, and network security. (i) A comparison with the legacy CSMA/CA scheme shows that the commodity Wi-Fi 6 achieves 3× overall throughput and dramatically reduce the latency (5×) when coexisting with legacy Wi-Fi network. (ii) However, the current OFDMA implementation significantly increases the power consumption (6×), implying a design tradeoff between throughput and latency gain versus the cost of energy consumption. (iii) Finally, TWT negotiating procedure is vulnerable to various malicious attacks. We believe that our findings provide critical insights for the scheduling algorithm design, power optimization, and security protection of the next-generation WLANs.