Paving the Way for Gigabit Networking

by Jean-Pierre Ebert et al. Global Communications Newsletter, April 2005 Wired LANs soared to the gigabit level some years ago, and terabit networks are in place for wide area networking. However, in terms of data rate, wireless short-range networks tend to lag one generation behind wired LANs. The recent second generation of wireless short-range networks offers transmission rates of up to 54 Mb/s. The third wireless LAN generation is under development and will materialize in the IEEE 802.11n standard in about two years. IEEE 802.11n WLANs will offer a few hundred megabits per second, but the performance gap from wired networks remains. he recently started project Wireless Gigabit with Advanced Multimedia aims to close this gap with a heterogeneous 1 Gb/s fourth-generation system based on high-data-rate orthogonal OFDM transmission, MIMO, and efficient MAC protocol techniques. Read the article