WLAN standards alphabet

There are plenty of other WLAN advances completed or in the works. Some of the lesser-known or more recent standards work on 802.11 are:

802.11d, multi-country roaming: Old by WLAN standards, the working group finalized 802.11d in 2001. It's a way for WLAN access points to broadcast what country they're in and what country-specific rules client network interface cards have to follow. You can fly from New York to Rome, walk into your office or hotel, fire up your wireless laptop and expect to connect with whatever WLAN is open.

802.11F, inter-access point protocol: The capital "F" designates a "recommended practice" not a formal standard in IEEE parlance. The basic idea was to create a way for access points to talk among themselves and to transfer data associated with a connection quickly from one access point to another. But WLAN vendors already have figured out how to do this on their own for their own access points. The document was published in mid-2003, but so far is not being embraced. "There are a set of technical issues that make this (hand-off) difficult," says Andrew Myles, manager of wireless standards for Cisco Systems's Wireless Networking Business Unit. "As far as I know at this point, no one is planning to support it."

802.11h, dynamic frequency selection, and transmission power control: the original idea for 802.11h was to create a set of management messages for access points and clients in the European 5-GHz band to coordinate efforts to avoid interfering with radar and satellite communications in the same band, Atheros' Li says. The WLAN devices select another channel and adjust power output if needed. But these same actions can be used to improve WLAN efficiency, quite apart from any specific regulatory rules, according to Li, as more countries open more 5-GHz bandwidth for use by 802.11a WLANs. The standard was final in September 2003. Products with some of these features might start appearing soon. Some elements of this work are being carried into another standard, 802.11k.

802.11j, use of the 4.9- to 5-GHz spectrum in Japan: Originally, this group's work was focused on making changes to the 802.11 media access control and 802.11a PHY layers to gain Japanese regulatory approval in this band. But Li points out that the FCC recently allocated this same band for licensed spectrum set aside solely for public safety and homeland security. The 802.11j work on how to use this spectrum could prove useful in the U.S. as vendors introduce products for public safety networks in this band.

802.11k, radio resource management: Launched in late 2002, this project will standardize an array of radio measurements, dealing with roaming requests, an array of data about the radio channel and data about the client devices. In addition, this data can be made available to higher-level WLAN management applications, where the information can be used in tasks such as optimizing performance and balancing traffic loads. Task Group K is sifting through some 1,000 comments that members submitted on the proposed standard during a recent ballot, says Clint Chaplin, wireless standards lead at Symbol Technologies. Completion is likely in mid-2005. According to Cisco's Myles, the Wi-Fi Alliance will launch a testing and certification program for 802.11d and k next year.

802.11r, fast roaming: Handing off clients quickly from one access point to another with their authentication and security policies intact becomes critical when clients are moving, such as VoIP calls made with handheld WLAN phones, Chaplin says. This group, launched in 2004, is creating a standard way to make roaming fast, so that users don't have to re-authenticate at each new access point or have their calls disrupted, he says.

-- 802.11s, wireless mesh for access points: Formed in early 2004, this group is creating a standard that will let access points act as routers for wireless data, forwarding traffic to neighboring access points as Internet nodes do today with a series of multi-hop transmissions. Such mesh networks are inherently more reliable because they can route around failed nodes, and can adjust to balance traffic loads and optimize performance. The members still are sorting out their approach and schedule. Symbol's Chaplin says the first call for proposals likely will be next month.