NI Introduces WLAN Measurement Suite Solution for 802.11ax High-Efficiency Wireless

National Instruments (NI) 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. The WLAN Measurement Suite, combined with NI’s RF vector signal transceiver (VST), allows engineers to measure the performance of their 802.11ax designs confidently in the presence of significant new changes to the 802.11 physical layer specification.

802.11ax, also called High-Efficiency Wireless (HEW), has the challenging goal of improving the average throughput per user by a factor of at least 4X 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, users 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.

“The fast pace of evolving wireless standards demands instrumentation that can evolve at the speed of software,” says Charles Schroeder, vice president of RF marketing at NI. “Our support for the latest 802.11ax draft standard in the WLAN Measurement Suite is part of the evolution of a platform that scales with changing connectivity standards and provides superior RF performance in lab and production environments.”

NI’s platform-based approach helps ensure that engineers 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. Engineers can take advantage of this smarter approach to RF test to help lower their cost of test and better prepare for future connectivity and cellular standardization initiatives, such as 5G.

To learn more visit www.ni.com/white-paper/53150/en.
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