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ZTE Communications ›› 2025, Vol. 23 ›› Issue (4): 10-15.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202504003

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Insights on Next Generation WLAN: High Experiences (HEX)

YANG Mao(), LI Bo, YAN Zhongjiang   

  1. Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China
  • Received:2025-09-11 Online:2025-12-25 Published:2025-12-22
  • About author:YANG Mao (yangmao@nwpu.edu.cn) received his BE and MS degrees in information and telecommunication engineering from Xidian University, China in 2006 and 2009, respectively, and his PhD degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, China in 2014. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. His research interests focus on wireless networking and communications, including next-generation cellular networks (6G) and WLAN (e.g. IEEE 802.11bn), the MAC and higher-layer technologies, non-orthogonal multiple access for 6G, software-defined wireless networking, and wireless network virtualization. His research projects are funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He has published over 100 research papers and has over 100 granted and pending international and Chinese patents. He is a member of the IEEE and a voting member of IEEE 802.11Working Group.
    LI Bo received his BE, MS, and PhD degrees in telecommunication engineering from Xidian University in 1994, 1997, and 2002, respectively. From 1997 to 1998, he was a visiting scholar in the Department of Engineering, Shizuoka University, Japan. From 2002 to 2004, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Trento, Italy. From July to December 2007, he was a visiting professor at the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA), France. He is currently a professor at the School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. His research interests are in the area of wireless networking and communications, including next-generation cellular networks (5G) and WLAN (e.g. IEEE 802.11ax and 11ay), MAC and higher-layer technologies, and non-orthogonal multiple access for 5G. He has published over 80 research papers and has over 40 granted and pending international and Chinese patents. He is a member of the IEEE.
    YAN Zhongjiang received his BE and PhD degrees in telecommunication engineering from Xidian University, China in 2006 and 2011, respectively. From September 2010 to December 2011, he was a visiting PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada. He is currently an associate professor with the School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. His research interests focus on wireless networking and communications, including protocol and algorithm design, modeling, performance analysis, and implementation of the media access control layer, radio resource management, and traffic scheduling strategies for wireless networks. He is a member of the IEEE and a voting member of IEEE 802.11 Working Group.

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Abstract:

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) have witnessed rapid growth in the past 20 years, with maximum throughput as the key technical objective. However, quality of experience (QoE) remains the primary concern for wireless network users. We point out that poor QoE is the most challenging issue in current WLANs and further analyze the key technical problems that cause poor QoE in WLANs, including fully distributed networking architectures, chaotic random access, awkward “high capability” issues, coarse-grained quality of service (QoS) architectures, ubiquitous and complicated interference, “no place” for AI issues, and heavy burden of standard evolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to point out that poor QoE is the most challenging problem in current WLANs, and the first to systematically analyze the technical problems that cause poor QoE in WLANs. We strongly suggest that achieving high experience (HEX) be the key objective of the next-generation WLANs.

Key words: wireless local area network, IEEE 802.11, quality of experiences, Wi-Fi, 802.11bn, ultra-high reliability