National Instruments (NI) recently announced an early access version of the WLAN Measurement Suite with support for the IEEE 802.11ax (draft 0.1) high-efficiency wireless draft standard. Combined with NI’s RF vector signal transceiver (VST), the WLAN Measurement Suite enables you to measure the performance of their 802.11ax designs confidently in the presence of significant new changes to the 802.11 physical layer specification.
Aso called High-Efficiency Wireless (HEW), the 802.11ax is intended to improve the average throughput per user by a factor of at least 4× in dense user environments. This new standard focuses on implementing mechanisms to serve more users a consistent and reliable stream of data (average throughput) in the presence of many other users.
The WLAN Measurement Suite offers the power and flexibility to generate and analyze a wide range of 802.11 waveforms, such as 802.11a/b/g/n/j/p/ac/ah/af. Now, with the measurement suite’s latest update targeting 802.11ax, you can speed up development work on 802.11ax devices. The software supports key features of 802.11ax, including narrower subcarrier spacing, 1024-QAM, and multi-user orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). The updated measurement suite also includes LabVIEW system design software example code to help engineers automate WLAN measurements quickly and easily.
NI’s platform-based approach helps ensure you can update their existing PXI RF test systems to support 802.11ax device testing with a simple software update and continue to do so as the 802.11ax standardization process evolves. You can take advantage of this smarter approach to RF test to help lower the cost of testing and better prepare for future connectivity and cellular standardization initiatives, such as 5G.
Source: National Instruments
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