IEEE 802.11be Wi-Fi 7: Feature Summary and Performance Evaluation
Xiaoqian Liu, Yuhan Dong, Yiqing Li, Yousi Lin, Ming Gan
Abstract
As emerging applications demand increasingly higher throughput, IEEE standard 802.11be – Extremely High Throughput (EHT), also known as Wi-Fi 7, was published on July 22, 2025. It can be used to meet the demand for the throughput of 4k/8k videos up to tens of Gb/s and low-latency video applications such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Wi-Fi 7 not only scales Wi-Fi 6 with doubled bandwidth, but also supports real-time applications, which brings revolutionary changes to Wi-Fi. In this article, we start by introducing the main objectives and timeline of Wi-Fi 7 and then list the latest key techniques which promote the performance improvement of Wi-Fi 7. Finally, we validate the most critical objectives of Wi-Fi 7 - the potential up to 30 Gb/s throughput and lower latency. System-level simulation results suggest that by combining the new techniques, Wi-Fi 7 achieves 30 Gb/s throughput and lower latency than Wi-Fi 6.