On IEEE 802.11: Wireless LAN Technology

TL;DR

This paper reviews IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standards, highlighting their impact on market adoption, technical features, and evolution across various frequency bands, emphasizing their role in expanding wireless broadband access.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of IEEE 802.11 standards, including historical context, technical details, and their significance in wireless broadband development.

Findings

IEEE 802.11 standards enabled widespread wireless LAN adoption.

The standards operate across multiple frequency bands including 2.4, 3.6, 5, and 60 GHz.

Earlier versions like HiperLAN are now obsolete but included for completeness.

Abstract

Network technologies are traditionally based on wireline solutions. But the introduction of the IEEE 802.11 standards have made a huge impact on the market such that laptops, PCs, printers, cellphones, and VoIP phones, MP3 players in our homes, in offices and even in public areas have incorporated the wireless LAN technology. Wireless broadband technologies nowadays provide unlimited broadband access to users which were previously offered only to wireline users. In this paper, we review and summarize one of the emerging wireless broadband technology i.e. IEEE 802.11,which is a set of physical layer standard for implementing wireless local area network computer communication in the 2.4,3.6,5 and 60GHz frequency band. They fix technology issues or add functionality which is expected to be required by future applications. Though some of the earlier versions of these technologies are obsolete (such as HiperLAN) now but still we have included them in this review for the sake of completeness.