Practical evaluation of Wi-Fi HaLow performance

Wi-Fi HaLow is one of the wireless communication technologies especially developed for the IoT. Compared to the legacy, new mechanisms and new features have been designed to increase the communication range and decrease the energy consumption. Transmissions are carried out in sub-1 GHz frequency bands, which should allow a range of 1 km and a maximum data rate of 150 kbps at this distance. However, these properties have never been validated with real equipment because consumer solutions have only recently been proposed by manufacturers. In this paper, equipment integrating the Newracom NRC-7292 chip is used to make measurements, in order to compare with the theory and to validate the use of this technology in IoT domains. Several measurement campaigns (indoor and outdoor environments) show the good behavior of the Wi-Fi HaLow in terms of range (up to 1 km for 23 dBm), throughput (nearly 6 Mbps for a 2 MHz Bandwidth) and latency. These measurements also provide one of the first real-life propagation models for 802.11ah wireless communications.