802.11 standards revised due to growth of wifi

The IEEE Standards Association has published revisions to the documentation defining wireless local area network (LAN) products.

IEEE 802.11  standards already provide the basis for products using wifi globally, but they have now been expanded further due to the increasing relevance of new applications, such as smart grids, the IEEE 802.11 working group explained.

It said that work on the next generation of IEEE 802.11 standard specifications had already commenced, with a variety of project goals in mind, including extensions that will increase the data rate by a factor of ten, improve audio and video delivery, increase range and decrease power consumption.

“The new IEEE 802.11 release is the product of an evolutionary process that has played out over five years and drawn on the expertise and efforts of hundreds of participants worldwide. More than 300 voters from a sweeping cross-section of global industry contributed to the new standard, which has roughly doubled in size since its last published revision,” said Bruce Kraemer, chair of the IEEE 802.11 working group.

He added that every day, about two million products that contain IEEE 802.11-based technology for wireless communications are shipped around the world.

The revised standards are available from the IEEE Standards Association website, and consolidate 10 amendments to the base standard that were approved since IEEE 802.11’s last full revision, in 2007.

IEEE 802.11-2012 is the fourth revision of the standard to be released since its initial publication in 1997.