Spectrum Requirement Prediction for Future WLAN based IoT Applications

With the explosion of emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications based on WLAN such as AR/VR and 8K video streaming, the expected growth in performance and data traffic places greater demands on WLAN. The existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz unlicensed spectrum cannot meet the growth in demand and the expected quality of service (QoS) for current applications. Considering the scarcity of spectrum resources, it is more important for the relevant regulators to accurately predict the spectrum requirement over the next five years. This paper analyzes and predicts spectrum requirement for two standards of WLAN, i.e., IEEE 802.11ax and IEEE 802.11ay. Specifically, for IEEE 802.11ax, we first predict the busy hour data traffic of WLAN over the next five years. Then, the WLAN Toolbox is adopted to simulate the data traffic of WLAN in a scenario of the indoor office building. We predict the total bandwidth for an 802.11ax network to reach the required rate and latency metric and come to the conclusion that extra three channels on 6GHz should be made available for unlicensed use, in addition to the unlicensed channels on 5GHz. In terms of IEEE 802.11ay enabled by millimeter wave, we use ns-3 to evaluate its performance with different channels on 60GHz. According to the requirement of these applications enabled by millimeter wave, it is concluded that four channels on 60GHz should be available for IEEE 802.11ay.