At present, digitalization is profoundly changing society, economy, and industry. As one of the pillars of the digital transition, Wireless LAN (WLAN) sees a huge application demand in any field, be it in people’s home networks, or in hospitals, schools, factories, etc. To meet such demand, Wi-Fi, i.e. the mainstream technical solution for WLAN, is rapidly evolving towards greater bandwidth, higher network speed and lower latency. Yet, even though Wi-Fi 6 has become the mainstream standard and Wi-Fi 7 standards are expected to be released in 2024, guaranteeing good user experience still faces significant challenges in different specific scenarios.
In this context, China established the World WLAN Application Alliance (WAA) in September 2022, with the aim of setting up a China-led international WLAN industry platform. On 4 November, WAA held its kick-off meeting in Shenzhen; themed as “jointly creating new WLAN experience”, it explored how to establish a scenario-based certification system and a complete performance standards system for WLAN, thus creating the best WLAN application experience for users.
Currently, two global organizations, i.e. IEEE and WFA, have made significant efforts in the development of WLAN technology to meet people’s application needs; but from the perspective of standardization, the two organizations have focused largely on the physical layers, with the aim of solving interaction problems among underlying devices. As result, there is a lack of standardization strategies and suggestions at the upper service layers – this will in fact be the focus of WAA’s standardization work in the future.
“WAA was born to fill this gap”, WAA president Zhang Ping affirmed during the kick-off meeting. “WAA’s vision is to provide to the digital world the type of WLAN that brings the best experience to users, with improved network performance and enhanced convenience. We need to establish a sound and unified WLAN performance standards and certification system, build the best WLAN application experience, and form a complete ecosystem by complementing the activities of IEEE. This is the value of WAA.”
WAA Secretary General Yang Tao further specified: “WAA has two priorities. The first is to establish a performance standards system to address the problem of user’s performance experience: WAA will develop unified standards and conduct testing and certification on these standards – all of which are currently lacking in the industry, thus providing great benefit. The second priority is to develop a global membership: WAA will attract international experts and carry out extensive cooperation and exchanges with international organizations, so as to become a genuine international standards and industry organization.”
At present, WAA has a total of 55 members, 18 of which are board members. These come from the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and central Asia, representing different segments of the production chain, including research institutes, network operators, telecommunications equipment providers, instruments and apparatus manufacturers, and certification bodies. However, so far WAA has not yet disclosed the full list of members.
In the future, WAA Alliance will take standards, certification, and open source as the three cornerstones of its mission and gradually optimize customer experience, from “connection experience” to “inaction experience”, and then to “application experience”. WAA plans to release three sets of evaluation standards and authorize five certification laboratories in 2023, which will carry out tests in 38 subclasses of six categories, namely basic performance, coverage performance, channel resource allocation, networking, reliability, and anti-interference. This will ensure the application performance of WLAN in homes, enterprise parks, smart grids, industrial internet, smart healthcare, IoT, and other scenarios.
