Wi-Fi 7 Streaming Stability: A Multi-Band, Multi-Bitrate Performance Assessment

Abstract

Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be) introduces key physical and medium access control (MAC) layer advancements, including wider channel bandwidths up to 320 MHz, 4096-QAM modulation, preamble puncturing, and tri-band operation across 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz to support high-bandwidth and low-latency wireless applications. Despite these advances, the application-level streaming behavior of Wi-Fi 7 networks under realistic multi-factor conditions remains insufficiently characterized in the literature. This paper presents an empirical and simulation-based evaluation of Wi-Fi 7 streaming stability, assessing, with one variable changed at a time, the separate effects of received signal strength (RSS), codec bitrate, frequency band, network layer protocol, media type, and network contention on playback delay for MP3 audio and MP4 video streams. A physical testbed comprising a Wi-Fi 7 access point and client devices is used to conduct controlled experiments across varying signal and network conditions, complemented by OMNeT++ simulation to assess MAC layer scalability under higher client densities. Each band was evaluated independently with Multi-Link Operation (MLO) disabled, so the results characterize single-link operation on Wi-Fi 7 hardware rather than coordinated 802.11be MLO; the codec bitrates tested (192–320 kbps) are low relative to the link capacity, so link saturation was not exercised in the testbed. Results show that RSS degradation non-linearly increases playback delay in the pooled results. Pooled across the conditions tested, not as a strong-signal subset, the bands rank as follows by mean playback delay: 2.4 GHz (7.05 s), 5 GHz (5.21 s), and 6 GHz (4.26 s). Higher codec bitrates were associated with lower playback delay, most plausibly because VLC’s pre-buffering threshold is filled sooner at higher bitrates on an unsaturated link. Network layer protocol (IPv4 vs. IPv6) showed no material difference in mean playback delay. Network contention, modeled through increasing concurrent client counts, increased playback delay from one to three testbed clients, and simulated network-layer delay increased from 40 to 80 clients. These findings provide a descriptive, multi-parameter, single-link performance baseline for Wi-Fi 7 audio and video streaming, providing practical guidance for network deployment and serving as a reference for future benchmarking of next-generation Wi-Fi 8 (IEEE 802.11bn) networks.