* Wi-Fi standards demand attention
Wi-Fi QoS and next-generation, high-speed networking standards have been grabbing the spotlight lately.
The long-coming Wi-Fi QoS standard was approved by the IEEE Task Group E late last month and has been submitted for publication. Meantime, once-warring camps with separate proposals for the 802.11n standard for 100M bit/sec-and-up Wi-Fi networking said last week they have found common ground by forming a third coalition with a compromise specification.
The packet-prioritization component of the 802.11e QoS standard has long been complete; the scheduled access (SA) component, which adds call admission control to Wi-Fi QoS, has now received its final stamp of approval. SA turns a wireless access point into a scheduler that determines how much time to allocate to each associated client and whether there is enough capacity to support a new client wishing to associate with it.
The standard might inspire the production of more 802.11a-capable voice handsets, which are currently scarce. VoIP can benefit by 802.11a’s many available channels from an interference-avoidance standpoint. When implemented in production Wi-Fi networks, 802.11e should improve the quality of VoIP calls and interactive video over WLANs.
However, 802.11e’s success also depends on related 802.11 standards aimed at hastening the time for certain functions to take place between access points as users roam from one AP to another, thereby reducing latency.
In the 802.11n arena, the newly formed Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) could break the technology impasse surrounding competing standards proposals for high-speed Wi-Fi networking based on multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) technology.
EWC last week announced its existence by introducing its own specification, backed by 27 companies that include a healthy cross-section of the competing World-Wide Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE) and TGn Sync groups.
EWC’s goal is to achieve the majority support required by the IEEE for a standard and also to form an “ecosystem” in which high-performance WLAN products will interoperate across a variety of brands and platforms ahead of standards. Among EWC’s members are Atheros, Broadcom, Cisco, Intel and Symbol Technologies.
