One of the surprise to egress fromCES 2008is the idea that the 802.11n wireless LAN standard just is n’t good enough .
Most if not all of the wireless chip Creator are going above and beyond the IEEE criterion to fine tune their 11n silicon to make a much more static , better deport and predictable signaling than that witness in today ’s wireless LAN gear . WLAN equipment vendor ( compare go-ahead WLAN products ) are gift a lot of cash and engine room expertness toward the same close , in the Cartesian product they envelop around those chips .
Much of that fine - tuning is being driven by the conviction that 11n will be the metier of choice for wirelessly streaming sound recording and especially telecasting , in support of what Cisco CEO John Chambers has dub “ visual networking . ”
Beyond basic networking
connection users in homes , nursing home function and small businesses are moving beyond basic wireless networking , says Phillip Pyo , product marketing theater director for Netgear of Santa Clara , Calif. More than e - mail and internet surfriding , users are focusing on advanced applications , such as gamey - definition television , on a miscellanea of non - PC devices , include internet attached storage boxes , Xboxes and other gambling console , and medium servers . “ All this need a much more resilient , genuine - time , high - throughput wireless LAN , ” Pyo tell .
“ The Wi - Fi business has been very microcomputer - centric , ” says Michael Hurlston , vice president and general coach of Broadcom ’s base and wireless networking business unit . “ We ’re moving the Wi - Fi market place into consumer electronics , such as fixed - top boxes and HDTV , and into portable CE machine such as handheld biz console and wise phones . ”
The 11n chip manufacturing business are race to make such a net with such gimmick possible . Broadcom used CES to reveal a single 11n chip , in new 65 - nanometer process technology , that can communicate simultaneously on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands , but is extremely effective in power use and dramatically pocket-sized than the previous chipset .
For many of these applications , 11n is attractive not plainly because of its raw data rates of 150 M to 350Mbps , but also because of its consistent , high throughput at greater distance , Hurlston says . “ Even 802.11 g can do eminent definition cyclosis , ” he say . “ But it ca n’t do consistent streaming at range . Our end is to offer 10Mbps at every point in the [ entire ] house . ”
The real 11n differences
Hurlston says the differences in 11n wo n’t be in “ pep pill and feeds ” but in how well it supports emerging applications .
To that end , Broadcom features dynamic power control condition , to selectively drop radio power grade to node who are near , so that power can be boosted for those further away . It also offers Modern bandwidth - management features that reposition the amount of bandwidth among the connected client to meet dissimilar program needs . And the troupe says its 11n reference design was the first licence by the FCC for dynamic frequency selection , a technique for dodge military or atmospheric condition systems . The pragmatic outcome is that it frees up an additional 15 channels for transmission .
Rival Atheros Communications is also ferment on “ tailoring the wireless LAN for this [ new ] kind of traffic — other than data point , ” enounce Todd Antes , vice United States President of marketing . One way of life is to make 11n , in effect , more aware of the broadband WAN connection and prioritize the incoming traffic consequently .
At CES , Atheros simulate an avowedly generous 6Mbps Internet association to an 11n dual - stria access pointedness with Atheros chip . Over that connection came a BitTorrent school term and , from a waiter , a motion picture time in Standard Definition Video ( SD Video ) , essentially simulating a 5Mbps IPTV session . The access point transmit both streams to a notebook PC . A public utility on the PC exhibit the bandwidth allocation that an Atheros algorithm was making , having sensed the imitate , incoming service of process provider pipe and prioritize the two flow , reserving about 85 % of the wireless bandwidth for the flick .
A monitor render the different , but consistent , bandwidth utilization of the two sessions , and the notebook ’s screen usher a perfect display of the motion-picture show . When the algorithm was close off , almost at once the BitTorrent exercise spiked sharply , and inconsistently , and the movie ’s image set about breaking up .
It’s not just the chip
But OK - tuning 11n call for more than the Wi - Fi atomic number 14 .
“ It ’s not just the chip , ” says Michael Tennefos , head of marketing for WLAN vendor Aruba Networks . “ It ’s things like the factual groove single-valued function , and the active power adjustment [ to the radio ] . ” The 11n product will be phased in gradually to most wireless local area web , he says , create intercrossed cyberspace with a mix of 11n , 11 g and 11a access code points and clients . “ In those cases , how do you attribute channel and handle baron level to avoid incumbrance ? It ’s quite an engineering challenge . ”
Vendors have come out with a broad range of gear in response . Netgear ’s newest 11n access points and routers , announce at CES , feature multi - antenna raiment now layer on the printed circuit board . These “ metamaterial ” antenna can be dedicated to either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands , and to separate sector of reporting . Software select the optimal signals and can exchange that selection if the radio oftenness environment changes .
Indeed , changes are more potential as the surroundings becomes more complex even in the comparatively uncrowded 5GHz band . Some of the wireless gamey - definition video demonstrations at CES this year used a 5GHz 11n linkup . Others , such as Westinghouse Digital ’s new high - definition LCD TV , use ultra wideband wireless silicon , in this vitrine from PulseLink , and SiBeam announced the first 60GHz chipset that implements the comparatively newfangled Wireless - HD monetary standard .
In most enterprises , picture has been a recession app — a closed circuit television set linkup that lets the CEO “ verbalise ” to employees nationwide , or a stick out - alone videoconferencing system . That seems likely to change , and dramatically , in part due to YouTube and social networking sites like FaceBook that have created a new cognizance of video as a communications medium
Perhaps as 11n spread out both within the dwelling and the workspace , WLAN will be designed and optimized for streaming medium , especially video . In which showcase meshwork professionals will be look much more closely at how prospective suppliers are finely - tuning 11n with that terminal in brain .
