| IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Medium Access Control Working Group |
What is IEEE 802.11
The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Medium Access Control (MAC) working group has been responsible for the development of the wireless communications standard for LANs. A typical architecture for an IEEE 802.11 wirless LAN is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 A typical wireless local area netork architecture.
The key features in FIgure 1 are:
- Wireless access point –
- Wireless network interface card –
- Wireless bridge –
IEEE 802.11 is more commonly refered to as WiFi (in fact WiFi should be used to refer to the products that implement the various IEEE 802.11 standards). The characteristics for the various IEEE 802.11 standards are summarised in Table 1.
Table 1 Summary of the characteristics of the various IEEE 802.11 standards.
|
Protocol
|
Release Data
|
Operational Frequency
|
Typica Data Rate
|
Max Data Rate
|
Coverage
|
| 802.11 | |||||
| 802.11a | |||||
| 802.11b | |||||
| 802.11g | |||||
| 802.11n |
Standards Activity
The set of standards published and developed are summarised in Table 2.
Table 2 Summary of the IEEE 802.11 standards.
|
Standard
|
Description
|
Status
|
|
IEEE 802.11, 1999 Edition
|
IEEE Standards for Information Technology — Telecommunications and Information Exchange between Systems — Local and Metropolitan Area Network — Specific Requirements — Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications
|
Published
|
|
IEEE 802.11a-1999
|
IEEE Standard for Information Technology—Telecommunications and information exchange between systems—Local and metropolitan area networks—Specific requirements—Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications—Amendment 1: High-speed Physical Layer in the 5GHz band
|
Published
|
|
IEEE 802.11b-1999
|
Supplement to 802.11-1999,Wireless LAN MAC and PHY specifications: Higher speed Physical Layer (PHY) extension in the 2.4 GHz band
|
Published
|