Column Control DTX

Testing New-Generation WLAN 802.11ac

Application Notes

The first popular standards for wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11a and b) were designed primarily to serve the needs of a laptop PC in the home and office, and later to allow connectivity “on the road” in airports, hotels, Internet cafes, and shopping malls. Their main function was to provide a link to a wired broadband connection for Web browsing and email. Since the speed of the broadband connection was the limiting factor, a relatively low-speed wireless connection was sufficient—802.11a provided up to 54 Mb/s at 5 GHz, and 802.11b up to 11 Mb/s at 2.4 GHz, both in unlicensed spectrum bands. To minimize interference from other equipment, both used forms of spread-spectrum transmission and were heavily encoded. A later revision of the standard, 802.11g in 2003, consolidated use in the 2.4 GHz band but maintained the maximum data rate at 54 Mb/s. However, by the same time, new usage models with the need for higher throughput had been recognized: data sharing amongst connected devices in the home or small office and wireless printing as examples. A study project was set up which produced 802.11n in 2009. As well as improving the maximum single-channel data rate to over 100 Mb/s, this new standard introduced MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) sometimes referred to as spatial streaming, where up to 4 separate physical transmit and receive antennas carry independent data that is aggregated in the modulation/demodulation process.

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Column Control DTX