R-TWT in Wi-Fi 7 and Beyond: Enabling Bounded Latency, Energy Efficiency, and Reliability

Applications with deterministic quality of service (QoS) requirements are becoming widespread, driving the evolution of wireless networks to meet strict performance demands. Wi-Fi 7, the latest generation of IEEE 802.11 standard, introduces Restricted Target Wake Time (R-TWT). It serves latency-sensitive traffic by providing contention-free channel access for certain devices and reducing their energy consumption. This paper evaluates the performance of R-TWT across diverse service types and network sizes in terms of worst-case latency, energy efficiency, collision rate, and throughput. The results, generated using the ns-3 simulator, show that R-TWT achieves bounded latency for sensitive traffic types, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time (RT) applications. Moreover, R-TWT outperforms legacy mechanisms, i.e., Power Saving Mode (PSM) and Distributed Coordination Function (DCF), by achieving higher energy efficiency and a lower collision rate. Furthermore, R-TWT maintains stable and scalable performance as network size increases. This makes it a robust solution for latency-sensitive and energy-efficient wireless applications.