The IEEE 802.11 working group has formed a new Task Group, 802.11bn, to develop a new amendment to support ultra-high reliability (UHR) for Wi-Fi networks, which will eventually shape what Wi-Fi 8 will look like. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic shaping (PS) scheme to improve the spectrum and power efficiency in medium to high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime forWi-Fi 8. The integration and compatibility with legacy Wi-Fi systems, as well as other Wi-Fi 8 candidate technologies like unequal modulation (UEQM) are addressed. An architecture with a single low-density parity-check (LDPC) encoder and multiple shaping encoders is devised to adapt to different qualities of spatial channels. Furthermore, we propose practical techniques to resolve issues like error propagation, scrambler re-synchronization, and packet length determination to ensure compatibility with legacy scrambling, subframe detection, and packaging flow. It is shown that the proposed constellation shaping scheme provides average 0.89 dB shaping gains over the legacy Wi-Fi scheme, and the shaping gains remain when UEQM and lifted LDPC are applied.

Many industrial automation systems rely on time-synchronized (and timely) communication among sensing, computing, and actuating devices. Advances in Ethernet enabled by time-sensitive networking (TSN) standards, being developed by the IEEE 802.1 TSN Task Group, are significantly improving time synchronization as well as worst case latencies. Next-generation industrial systems are expected to leverage advances in distributed time coordinated computing and wireless communications to enable greater levels of automation, efficiency, and flexibility. Significant progress has been made in extending accurate time synchronization over the air (e.g., 802.1AS profile for IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi). Given the inherently unreliable, varying capacity and latency prone characteristics associated with wireless communications, proving the feasibility of worst case latency performance over the wireless medium is a major research challenge. More specifically, understanding what levels of capacity, reliability, and latency could be guaranteed over wireless links with high reliability are important research questions to guide the development of new radios, protocols, and time coordinated applications. This paper provides an overview of the potential applications, requirements, and unique research challenges to extend TSN capabilities over wireless. The paper also describes advances in wireless technologies (e.g., next-generation 802.11 and 5G standards) toward achieving reliable and accurate time distribution and timeliness capabilities. It also provides a classification of wireless applications and a reference architecture for enabling the integration of wired and wireless TSN capabilities in future industrial automation systems.