Wi-Fi 6 / WLAN Testing

Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E hold tremendous promise in powering a paradigm shift in connectivity. But, more than ever, innovation is needed to fulfil its huge potential – which in turn requires testing to take Wi-Fi to an unprecedented level.

At the start of 2020, Wi-Fi 6 adoption was just starting to be pursued in earnest, while mesh Wi-Fi was steadily growing in importance for whole-home coverage. But the arrival of the pandemic has accelerated some trends, slowed others, and set the scene for revised future use-cases, market forecasts, and product development and testing requirements.

An increasing number of medical devices enabled with Wi-Fi technology are entering the healthcare industry, ranging from simple applications to mission critical real-time applications. Blog outlines the market drivers for healthcare Wi-Fi networks.

Learn how to validate 802.11 WLAN AP and device performance, ensure network security, maximize service coverage.

The IEEE ratified 802.11ac Wave 2 as a wireless local area network (WLAN) standard in November 2013.  As the industry has begun to adopt the Wave 2 products for either carrier and enterprise deployment or consumer home applications, understanding 802.11ac Wave 2 becomes increasingly critical for equipment manufacturers and service providers. Therefore, testing and validating the Wave 2 features has become an urgent topic that challenges relevant testing engineers for performing testing in ether a lab or a field environment. 

The testing methodology presented in this Solution Brief will explore the benefits of implementing multi-AP networking for a complex large home environment which involves multiple device clients sharing the same multiple wireless interface. The benchmarks or expected throughput performance numbers discussed for specific test cases are also listed as a reference for comparison purposes. Discussions on the topics of how to test some advanced features such as Band Steering, inter-AP roaming, and Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) feature are also included in this solution brief on the throughput performance testing of multi-AP system using Spirent TestCenter.