Taiwanese IoT firm Advantech is collaborating with Rohde & Schwarz (R&S) to establish a compliant & deployment-ready validation approach for industrial Wifi 7 (802.11be) modules.

By combining German company R&S expertise in signalling and RF measurements, pre-compliance, and OTA and interoperability testing with Advantech’s industrial wireless platforms and field-proven integration, the companies aim to help users shorten multi-region approvals, reduce deployment risk and accelerate time to market.

Wifi 7 delivers high throughput, low latency and reliability. With multi-link operation (MLO) and 320MHz wide channels, it enables real-time, interference-resilient connectivity between devices, sensors and edge servers. Advantech’s AIW-173 industrial Wifi 7 module focuses on applications that demand stringent bandwidth, latency and stability, in particular medical imaging, robotics, AMR, rugged endpoints and pro AV.

“R&S has been specialising in wireless testing and regulatory verification for a long time,” said Sean Ting, R&S senior regional sales manager. “We are excited to assist Advantech’s Wifi 7 module development process and to provide support on important Wifi 7 features like MLO and 320MHz. The industrial markets also need support for high data throughput to fulfil unmanned applications. Our next-generation wireless communication tester CMX500 provides Advantech with substantial Wifi 7 verification features and supports their demanding time to market goals.”

Jerry Chiang, director of Advantech’s embedded IoT group, added: “By moving design validation, pre-compliance, and OTA and interoperability earlier into R&D and pre-pilot stages, we ensure a verifiable and scalable wireless experience and enable customers to adopt Wifi 7 faster, across more countries and regions.”

Collaboration highlights include:

• Compliance acceleration: Pre-compliance with automated test mapping against Wifi 7 metrics and common regulatory requirements helps shorten multi-region certification cycles and reduce rework.
• Field-grade reliability: Focus on MLO, 320MHz, 6GHz operation, true-MIMO, multi-stream, roaming, handover and multi-device coexistence, with OTA and interoperability testing to ensure stable performance in complex environments such as factories, hospitals and public facilities.
• Quality assurance (pre-production): A unified flow – signalling and RF plus OTA and interoperability plus pre-compliance – is introduced in R&D pilot stages to identify risks early and shorten debugging cycles before mass production.

Applications include medical imaging and operating rooms with high-resolution streaming and low-latency control in interference-intense environments, validated via OTA, interoperability and coexistence testing. It also suits robotics, AMR and smart manufacturing where MLO, 320MHz and optimised handover improve connectivity on the move, supporting factory NPN and mixed-band operations. And for rugged endpoints and pro AV use, it provides validated concurrency and interference resilience for long-duration, long-range, high-quality transmission across large venues or outdoors.

For more on Advantech, visit www.advantech.com.

• R&S (www.rohde-schwarz.com), in cooperation with Samsung (www.samsung.com), is driving the commercialisation of 5G-based non-terrestrial networks by validating first NR-NTN test cases according to 3GPP Release 17 test specifications for RF, RRM and PCT. This, says R&S, makes it the first and only test and measurement provider to deliver validated coverage for 5G NR-NTN across all three test domains. Both companies have worked together to enable the validation of the first 5G-based New Radio non-terrestrial networks (NR-NTN) test cases in accordance with the 3GPP test specifications for RF, RRM and PCT using conformance test products from R&S.