Wi-Fi inherent strengths and extensive portfolio drive its leading role in IoT.

Wi-Fi inherent strengths and extensive portfolio drive its leading role in IoT.

Wi-Fi’s inherent strength and comprehensive portfolio drive its leadership role in IoT.
Wi-Fi’s inherent strength and comprehensive portfolio drive its leadership role in IoT.
Wi-Fi is uniquely suited to support IoT products and applications due to its wide capabilities and expansion as a global standard. Wi-Fi plays a role in almost every IoT environment, alone or in combination with more specialized protocols or technologies.

“Wi-Fi delivers the ‘Internet’ of the Internet of Things to more applications, more use cases, and more environments than any other IoT technology option,” said Edgar Figueroa, President, and CEO, of Wi-Fi Alliance®. “IoT is meant to improve people’s lives, and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED solutions provide the quality, reliability, and security that enable the full potential of the Internet of Things.”

“Wi-Fi addresses the needs of a variety of device types and uses cases in the IoT market,” said Phil Solis, director of research at IDC. “Wi-Fi can provide a wide range of data rates and range at different price points because there are many Wi-Fi chips that support different levels of complexity and many unlicensed spectrum bands below 1 GHz up to 6 GHz. It is this diversity of chip designs that enables Wi-Fi to meet the widest range of requirements for IoT products and networks.

The Wi-Fi Alliance outlines eight Wi-Fi features to consider when choosing an IoT technology:

Interoperable standards-based technology: The promise of IoT is built on a wide range of device manufacturers. Wi-Fi provides a common platform to power a growing range of IoT applications with varying power, performance, and latency requirements. Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ provides assurance that billions of devices will work together to deliver a quality user experience regardless of the product brand.
Broad connectivity: IoT systems are often controlled through mobile devices, and Wi-Fi enables seamless control of smartphones, tablets, and the 18 billion Wi-Fi devices currently in use to help unlock the full potential of the Internet of Things. Extensive global connectivity enables users and network operators to connect and control a unified system.
Proven WPA3™ security: Sensitive government, industry and personal information is exchanged through IoT applications. Wi-Fi offers proven WPA3™ security to protect information exchanged in personal and business environments. A selection of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED IoT devices ensures that data is protected with the latest enterprise-grade security protocols.
Cost-effective and simple to deploy: Wi-Fi is an easy-to-deploy and cost-effective foundation that does not require separate gateways or specialized expertise to deliver IoT applications. Trusted and deployed every day by users around the world, Wi-Fi is constantly evolving to simplify device pairing, network authentication, and more.
Backwards compatibility: Wi-Fi is a smart investment for IoT product architects considering cost, reliability and support to future-proof their technology investment. Wi-Fi will stand the test of time, reduce the risk of premature obsolescence and ensure that older devices can easily connect to home networks.
Location Awareness: Wi-Fi Location™ provides low-level location information enabling various location-aware IoT services for industrial and smart city environments, enabling benefits such as asset management, network management and geo-fencing.
Reliable and sophisticated connectivity: Home and industrial IoT networks require consistent and reliable connectivity. Wi-Fi 6 networks provide sophisticated network efficiency, diagnostic, management and optimization capabilities. Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E handle multiple simultaneously connected devices and high data throughput while delivering high performance and low latency for applications including 4K video streaming and AR/VR. Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E also allow devices such as manufacturing robots and drones to stay connected even when moving or “roaming” across home or industrial networks.
Flexible network topology: In addition to traditional Wi-Fi connections via access points, Wi-Fi CERTIFIED EasyMesh™, Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wi-Fi Aware™ and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wi-Fi Direct® offer a variety of network topologies. into various IoT environments for scalable and customizable capabilities to meet IoT network and IoT application needs. Wi-Fi offers network administrators more flexible topology options for IoT network connections than star or mesh topologies.