As well as providing a showcase for new products and services, Mobile World Congress is an occasion for industry bodies to gather and review ongoing work designed to set new benchmarks and establish the future direction of key enabling technologies.
During MWC 2025, members and industry partners of the World WLAN Application Alliance (WAA) convened to review work in progress and announce the organization’s recent output in terms of recommendations.
The WAA, whose membership includes network equipment vendors, telecoms operators, internet companies and chipmakers amongst others, is working with multiple international organizations to promote the global WLAN industry worldwide. Among its goals are the release of a joint initiative aimed at improving WLAN performance and experience worldwide, and the establishment of an international brand of certification for WLAN performance and experience.
In pursuit of the second of these aims the WAA announced that it has upgraded its test and certification system, and appointed TÜV, a world-renowned test and certification organization, as an authorized laboratory. This will help to boost its certification process and provide new impetus for the standardization and high-quality development of the WLAN industry, according to the WAA.
These initiatives mark a key step in ensuring the WLAN user experience and providing an important reference for the performance experience standards and high-quality development of the global WLAN industry, says the WAA.
The breadth of WLAN technology adoption is extensive, and embraces application scenarios such as the home, manufacturing, healthcare and education as well as many others, says Zhang Ping, Chair of WAA.
There is no ceiling to WLAN technology, and a lot can be achieved through flexible modification with WLAN, Prof. Zhang explains. Moreover, WLAN is free of charge in most scenarios and there are more users of WLAN, hence the WAA is working a lot with industries and with the telecom operators, such as those in China.
The new WAA standard complements 802.11 by focusing on the user experience and the metrics of that experience, Prof. Zhang explains. What the WAA does is to certify whether or not the user experience is good.
Beyond 802.11 Evolution
While the WAA is looking at the standards above the radio layer, the IEEE’s 802.11 standard focuses mainly on the physical layer, explains Dr. Jim Lansford, Chair of the IEEE’s Wireless Next-Generation Standing Committee.
Efforts to evolve WLAN technology over the last three decades have been focused on providing a better quality of experience over a wireless medium, but trying to make a radio connection which is noisy, unreliable and insecure support applications like industrial control or videoconferencing is challenging, Dr. Lansford says,
The need is to have a more comprehensive picture of both the radio technology and all the pieces that come together to make the overall user experience, says Dr Lansford. “If we just have an application that doesn’t know what’s going on in the wireless network, or if we have wireless with lots of features but that doesn’t know what the application needs, that’s not useful,”
“When you connect to an access point it advertises what standards it supports and what kind of data rates, but what you can’t tell is whether it can deliver any kind of latency or bandwidth guarantees. You don’t know if it can actually give you what the application needs. So we need a more comprehensive look across both the radio and the applications.”
More intelligence is needed at the lower layers in order to understand how best to use the different technologies that are built into devices, says Dr Lansford. The radio control layer needs better intelligence about the application such as, in the case of industrial control, the required data rate and latency.
If the application can’t get that from the current WiFi connection, it either needs to look for a different WiFi connection, or needs to use 5G in addition. “Many devices have both cellular and WiFi, so maybe you can use a combination of the two to figure out the best way to meet the user requirements.“
Application of AI in WLAN
Prof. Zhang Ping believes AI can be used to capture best performance and user experience data, he suggests.
Looking forward to 6G, Prof. Zhang believes that by using this AI-extracted information from the outset and only transmitting the intent, the requirements for capacity would not be as high as had previously been necessary. Addressing these issues from the source of the information would also provide a solution to the problems of using more frequency bands or more bandwidth to transmit information, and consequential issues such as high power consumption.
In future AI might even also be used to create new air interfaces, he suggests.
