## 3 Performance Evaluation  
To evaluate the performance of the IEEE 802.11 standard, a series of tests were conducted in three relevant environments with different physical configurations. This section provides details on the Wi-Fi network architecture used, the various configurations assessed, the methods applied to evaluate network capabilities, and an explanation of the three environments selected, based on the network architecture depicted in Figure 2. Each of these tests incorporated three traffic patterns designed to emulate realistic data transmission behaviours commonly observed in industrial and urban deployments.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l l} \hline \hline
**Feature** & **Wi-Fi 4** & **Wi-Fi 5** & **Wi-Fi 6** & **Wi-Fi 6E** & **Wi-Fi 7** \\ \hline IEEE Standard & 802.11n & 802.11 ac & 802.11 ax & 802.11 ax & 802.11 be \\ Theoretical Maximum & 600 Mbps & 3.5 Gbps & 9.6 Gbps & 9.6 Gbps & 46 Gbps \\ Throughput & & & & & \\ Frequency Bands & 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz & 5 GHz & 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, & 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, & 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, \\  & & 20 MHz, 40 MHz, & 20 MHz, 40 MHz, & 20 MHz, 40 MHz, & 20 MHz, 40 MHz, \\ Bandwidth & 20 MHz, 40 MHz & 80 MHz, & 80 MHz, & 80 MHz, & 80 MHz, \\  & & 80 + 80 MHz, & 80 + 80 MHz, & 80 + 80 MHz, & 80 + 80 MHz, \\  & & 160 MHz & 160 MHz & 160 MHz, & 160 MHz, 320 MHz \\  & & & & & OFDM and & OFDM and \\ Frequency Multiplexing & OFDM & OFDM & OFDMA & OFDMA & OFDMA \\  & & & & & OFDMA \\ Maximum Modulation & 64-QAM & 256-QAM & 1024-QAM & 1024-QAM & 4096-QAM \\ MU-MIMO & N/A & 8 \(\times\) 8 DL & 8 \(\times\) 8 UL/DL & 8 \(\times\) 8 UL/DL & 16 \(\times\) 16 UL/DL \\ Other advanced features & N/A & N/A & BSS Coloring, RU, & BSS Coloring, RU, & MLO, MRU, r-TWT \\  & & & & TWT & TWT \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 1: Summary of technical capabilities of the latest Wi-Fi standards.  
The first traffic pattern is based on the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), which is widely implemented for network diagnostic and monitoring purposes, such as those executed via the ping utility. This pattern involves the transmission of Echo Request messages and the reception of corresponding Echo Reply messages from the destination node. While ICMP imposes minimal load on the network, it is instrumental in capturing key performance indicators, including round-trip latency, packet loss rates, and link stability, critical parameters in industrial use cases.  
In parallel, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) traffic was generated using iperf3, enabling the emulation of stateful, connection-oriented communication typical of services such as web browsing, cloud storage, and multimedia streaming. Owing to its inherent congestion control and error-correction features, TCP traffic is particularly suited for stress-testing network capacity and throughput stability.  
Furthermore, traffic based on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was also generated via iperf3. Unlike TCP, UDP supports a connectionless paradigm, which makes it ideal for simulating delay-sensitive applications where timely delivery is prioritised over reliability. Such applications include Voice over IP (VoIP), online conferencing, and real-time video, core components of many industrial IoT systems. Since UDP does not implement retransmission mechanisms, it provides valuable insight into network behaviour under conditions of constrained bandwidth and variable interference, particularly in assessing packet loss and jitter performance.