Latency improvements in comparison to 802.11ac

[jivazam]

How much latency improvements on 802.11ax in comparison to 802.11ac?

[Devin Akin]

11ax has at least a chance to improve latency by creating more contention domains, and therefore less contention.

[jivazam]

A customer asked me to show data on latency comparison between 11ax and 11ac. What would be the best way to capture it in lab / real environment?

[Devin Akin]

You have to first have an 11ax AP and client in order to do the comparison.

Second, you have to have a way to capture 11ax. Today there are no radios for client-side capture, so you would have to use an AP as a radio capture device.

Run an application with 11ac and capture. Then run the same application with 11ax and capture. Compare timing values between the two captures.

[Anonymous]

It may also be possible to see some latency improvements simply from reduced airtime usage due to various OFDMA and MU-MIMO techniques that send data to multiple clients in a single transmission. Only time will tell how significant those improvements will be (if at all), and in which specific use cases they tend to present themselves. Those gains could just as easily be offset by additional management overhead traffic.

Your key factors on the Wi-Fi side that relate to latency: Medium access/Airtime, Retry rate, and data rate. Optimize those, and your latency should improve significantly.

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