IEEE 802.11be: Throughput and Reliability Enhancements for Next Generation WI-FI Networks

The IEEE 802.11be Task Group (TG) was created in May 2019 to develop the Extremely High-Throughput (EHT) 802.11be amendment for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). This paper analyses the throughput, capacity and reliability improvements due to two candidate technologies forecasted in the Project Authorization Request (PAR): the increase of maximum number of spatial streams from 8 to 16 and introduction of Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) retransmission protocols [1]. The simulation results, validated using a first-order approach, for single-user multiple-input multiple output (SU-MIMO) with transmit beamforming (TxBF), downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) technologies show expressive gains on the throughput and reliability due to the implementation of Chase combining HARQ in systems with 16 antenna ports in the 802.11ax/be physical layer (PHY).