This white paper is a design aid for a technical audience of chief technology officers (CTOs), Internet of Things (IoT) solution architects and embedded engineers who are interested in adding or upgrading Wi-Fi technology on their embedded devices. Today, while casual users of Wi-Fi may find it hard to appreciate the value brought in by the new revisions in technology, more keen observers of the market expect Wi-Fi-6/6E to become the dominant standard by the end of this decade and to replace a lot of legacy Wi-Fi hardware in the field in the process. To bridge this gap for the avid reader, this document seeks to look under the hood of Wi-Fi technology by providing a specialist summary of the differences between legacy and new Wi-Fi technologies.

After an introduction to the main building blocks of legacy Wi-Fi, this white paper identifies the drawbacks that make legacy Wi- Fi unsuitable for modern networking. Thereafter, it emphasises the role of modern technologies introduced in Wi-Fi 6/6E that make it a breakaway upgrade with a focus on improving networking efficiency. Thereafter, features of Wi-Fi 7 are discussed briefly to explain why this new standard is suitable for high-throughput and low-latency applications, where Wi-Fi 6/6E may fall short. In context of the expected device capability overhaul on a massive scale, this white paper reserves the penultimate chapter to explain the ever-increasing importance of wireless modules to aid device designers in integrating new Wi-Fi on their devices. The concluding chapter explains the role that Panasonic Industry is playing in enabling the transition to new Wi-Fi standards through its portfolio of wireless module solutions.