The Wi-Fi Alliance has launched the Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 Release 2 with new performance and power management upgrades that support increasing device and traffic density. Deployments are increasing globally in large office buildings, public arenas, education campuses, high rise dwellings, and mass transportation hubs, with nearly two billion Wi-Fi 6 devices entering the market in 2022, according to IDC Research, said the Wi-Fi Alliance.

The Wi-Fi Certified 6 Release 2 adds support for uplink multi-user multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) for smoother streaming services and video conferencing, faster uploads, and more reliable gaming. It adds three power management features that improves power efficiency in enterprise, industrial, and IoT applications. The alliance said the new features apply across all bands: 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 6 GHz.

The new support for uplink multi-user MIMO enables devices to upload content concurrently to an access point (AP). Uplink multi-user MIMO is designed to improve network performance and reduce latency for applications like video conferencing and uploading documents that require greater uplink capacity.

Designed to improve power management for devices in enterprise and IoT deployments, including smart home, smart city, and industrial IoT (IIoT), the Wi-Fi Certified 6 Release 2 adds low power and sleep mode enhancements, including broadcast target wake time (TWT), extended sleep time, and dynamic multi-user spatial multiplexing power save (SMPS), to enable power optimization of multiple battery-powered devices.

These features “allow multiple devices to receive extended sleep periods, allow for specific “wake up” times for transmitting data, and enable dynamic shut off of redundant receive chains to optimize power consumption in Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 Release 2 networks,” said the Wi-Fi Alliance.

“Wi-Fi 6 adoption has outpaced previous Wi-Fi generations, driven by demand for better Wi-Fi connectivity in phones, tablets, PCs, and access points to support high-performance, low latency uses in both residential and enterprise environments,” said Phil Solis, research director at IDC,” in a statement. “Technological advancements continue to bring speed and efficiency benefits to a wide number of users and use cases, most importantly, in areas with high densities of users or client devices connecting and transferring large amounts of data. Reduction in chipset costs and advancements in Wi-Fi 6 power management will also help shift the IoT space to more broadly adopt Wi-Fi 6 in the coming years.”