* A look at the wireless proposals that promise to make WLANs faster
This week’s Technology Update takes a look at one of the myriad wireless proposals that promise to make wireless LANs faster.
And by 100M bit/sec, it means it. Wireless overhead can add up to a significant percentage of the data – in the case of 802.11a/g, typically more than half of the data rate. 802.11n promises to remedy that.
But how soon it can come up with a complete standard is anyone’s guess.
According to our author (jwinters@motia.com.), the IEEE is considering a wide variety of proposals to build 802.11n. In fact four complete and 28 partial proposals for 802.11n were presented at the IEEE meeting in September. These proposals will be evaluated and hopefully converged to a final proposal in subsequent meetings which occur every two months.
Achieving this throughput within the unlicensed channel of 20 MHz requires improvements in both the physical layer (i.e., the raw data rate) and the efficiency of the media access layer (MAC), such that the throughput is closer to the raw data rate, our author says.
The idea ultimately is to create an environment that can support streaming video and other big bandwidth applications.
For more on this topic see: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/tech/2004/112204techupdate.html
