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Nikolitsa
Maria ([email protected]
Papadimitriou
Ioannis ([email protected])
Modern Wireless Technologies
for Office and Home Networking
Abstract:
Recent
breakthroughs in wireless technologies are changing the way people are acting
and behaving while at work or at home. For the first time, it is feasible to
exchange data, audio and video over broadband wireless channels, enabling the
consumer to use a great number of applications with different performance
requirements.
In
this project, we are describing and comparing the standards that will dominate
the office and home networking industry in the following years. Their popularity
is based on the fact that they all operate in unlicensed frequency bands. We
divide these protocols into two areas. The first one (presented by Maria)
contains Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b, which facilitate the
exchange of relatively low-rate personal information between consumer electronic
devices, such as PDAs, laptops, cell phones and printers. The second part
(presented by Ioannis) is about IEEE 802.11a and HiperLAN/2,
which are able to service high-demanding data and multimedia applications. There
is another standard, called HomeRF, which is designed exclusively for
home networking and it can be placed between these two areas, as its technical
characteristics are closer to those of standards of the first area, but can also
support applications targeted by standards of the second area. Therefore, it
will be treated by both of us while comparing the standards.
After
a brief description of the standards mentioned above, we focus on comparing them
with respect to several aspects: range performance, system capacity, bandwidth
sharing techniques, power control, topologies, interference immunity, Quality of
Service (QoS), maximum mobility, scalability, security. We explore the tradeoffs
that make one better than another under different application requirements and
working environments. We finally investigate the important role that cost and
market practices can play in determining the standard or standards that will
dominate the exponentially growing area of enterprise and home wireless
networking.
You can download the full document in pdf format from here...