The Wi-Fi Alliance recently introduced the Wi-Fi 6E standard, an extension to Wi-Fi 6 (also known as IEEE 802.11ax) that enables the operation in the unlicensed 6 GHz band in addition to the currently-supported 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. Therefore, Wi-Fi 6E devices and ultra-wideband (UWB) systems are now allowed to operate in the same 6 GHz spectrum, which may lead to coexistence issues and affect the performance of UWB-based systems, as the latter operate at a significantly lower power than common Wi-Fi 6E devices.
Our research group was the first to confirm experimentally that both the communication and the ranging performance of UWB may degrade in presence of Wi-Fi 6E traffic.
In cooperation with NXP Semiconductor, we would like to study further how Wi-Fi 6E affects UWB performance and possible countermeasures to enable the design of robust location-aware Internet of Things applications using UWB technology.
To this end, we will use NXP SR150 boards deployed in our large-scale UWB testbed infrastructure hosted at our institute, which also includes several Wi-Fi 6E devices across a hallway and an office. The use of such a testbed facility largely simplifies experimentation.