Extended Spectrum Access: A Game Changer for WiFi-6E

Over the past few decades, there has been a significant increase in the global population of internet users, electronic devices, and internet connectivity. Among the available technologies, WiFi stands out as one of the most widely used mediums for accessing the Internet. This paper aims to emphasize the significant role of the extended spectrum access in the 6 GHz band in enhancing the performance of WiFi-6E. We demonstrate this by conducting a simulation-based analysis for an indoor scenario, a multi-storey building with a dense WiFi deployment, comparing the performance of WiFi−5 and WiFi−6E with varying degree of control over the spectrum access. For WiFi modeling we use the Matlab Simulink toolbox, and apply Monte-Carlo simulation for results generation. The results show that WiFi-6E consistently outperforms WiFi-5: the extended spectrum access in WiFi-6E allows much higher and much more consistent throughput due to the significantly reduced inter access point (AP) interference. Furthermore, based on two simple controlled channel allocation algorithms, one with static channel allocation and another with dynamic channel allocation, we show that while spectrum access in both WiFi-5 and WiFi-6E benefits from controlled access, the performance of WiFi-6E can be significantly improved when the spectrum access is controlled for more than 50% of the APs in the multi-storey building.