A Survey on IEEE 802.11bn Wi-Fi 8: Advantages of Ultra High Reliability for Next-Generation Wireless LANs

Although Wi-Fi 7 is able to achieve a maximum throughput of up to 30 Gbps, reliability shortfalls, high latency, and low signal transmission efficiency still exist in frontier domains such as the Industrial Internet, the Metaverse, and autonomous driving. To address these issues, the IEEE 802.11 working group initiated a new standard study, IEEE 802.11bn, also known as Ultra-High Reliability (UHR). This paper systematically surveys the UHR Task Group’s research progress on the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers, introducing specific technical enhancements including Distributed Resource Unit (DRU), Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS), 2×Low-Density Parity-Check (2×LDPC), Cooperative Spatial Reuse (Co-SR), Cooperative Beamforming (Co-BF), Seamless Mobility Domain (SMD), High Priority Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (P-EDCA), Non-Primary Channel Access (NPCA), and Dynamic Subband Operation (DSO). Furthermore, through a survey of the IEEE 802.11 TIG Task Group and relevant literature, this paper also explores the potential use cases of AI/ML technology in the Wi-Fi standardization process. Finally, this paper proposes the challenges, open issues, and future directions for UHR standardization, contributing to the advancement of Wi-Fi.