TABLE OF CONTENTS There are developments in all aspects of wireless LANs for example developments to use different parts of the radio spectrum, improving data access speeds and security, providing quality of service management and mechanisms to facilitate user movement. As indicated within Table 3.1, some of these developments are within the IEEE802.11 standards. Others, also discussed below, use significantly different technologies. Beyond simply improving the user experience, many of these developments will open up new applications and services. For example, some of these technologies operate in the 5 GHz radio spectrum. Since some of this spectrum permits outdoor use we could envision such wireless LANs being used to make a low-cost cellular style network.
In addition to the IEEE802.11b standard, there are many other standards in the IEEE802.11 series as illustrated in Table 3.1. The IEEE802.11a standard is currently receiving much attention.
| IEEE802.11a | A physical layer standard that provides data rates of 6-54 Mbit/s over the 5 GHz frequency band. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used to provide these high data rates and the 5 GHz band offers less RF interference compared to the 2.4 GHz band. For use in USA (IEEE802.11h is the European solution). |
| IEEE802.11b | A physical layer standard that enhances the original IEEE802.11 direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) to provide 5.5 and 11 Mbit/s data rates on top of the original 1 and 2 Mbit/s, IEEE802.11b uses the complementary code keying (CCK) modulation system to make more efficient... |
