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802.11n: Morphing to meet new demands

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Michael Kassner

Published: 11 Jun 2008 12:05 BST

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Some industry watchers have presented the idea that equipment based solely on 802.11n will not adequately support emerging applications. If the technology displayed at this year's CES is any indication, Wi-Fi chip and equipment developers are beginning to agree with this assessment.

New applications mean new requirements
From early on, Wi-Fi has been focused exclusively on data traffic pertaining to home and business applications. Now, Wi-Fi is seen as a viable network transmission medium for a variety of non-PC devices and their associated applications.

HDTV equipment, gaming consoles, smartphones and alternative audio/video streaming devices are some that come to mind. Adding these alternative devices to a typical 802.11a/g network can, and usually does, create frustrating throughput and Quality of Service (QoS) issues.

So, it is not sufficient to have just a bullet-proof Wi-Fi network that is reliable, high bandwidth, affording great coverage, and uninterruptible RF propagation as envisioned by 802.11n. The Wi-Fi networks of today need to have cutting-edge QoS enhancements as envisioned by 802.11e.

These enhancements allow the network management system to be intelligent enough to determine the type and priority of all of the traffic — VoIP for example — passing through the network.

By understanding this, 802.11n chip and equipment manufacturers instead of just meeting the criteria laid out by 802.11n, are adding enhancements that meet or exceed perceived requirements being presented by new home, small or home office, and enterprise customers' applications.

Improved silicon
Broadcom and Atheros, two major developers of chipsets for Wi-Fi devices have displayed some new and very innovative chipset features at CES this year.

Interestingly enough, these features correspond directly to the QoS and bandwidth requirements of the emerging applications. It is also apparent that both chipmakers now understand that Wi-Fi will be the network of choice for streaming traffic especially video. There is even a new term, 'visual networking', as coined by Cisco CEO John Chambers.

At CES, Broadcom presented a new 802.11n chipset that uses 65nm technologies. Broadcom is a.lso definitely paying attention to 'visual networking' requirements by developing a dynamic power control component.

This feature provides a sensory intelligence that controls RF power levels depending on the physical distance between the access point and clients, which allows more RF output to be focused on the clients that are further away.

To complement the power control feature, Broadcom also has improved bandwidth management capabilities of the chip to handle the new and more demanding applications that are sensitive to bandwidth fluctuations. Additionally, the new chip has a smaller footprint than previous chips, which leads to more efficient power consumption.

Finally, and most impressively, the chip has the ability to simultaneously transmit on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

Atheros also displayed some amazing new technology at CES, with a great deal of thought toward the new emerging applications. Atheros has made both hardware and firmware improvements so the chip will be more sensitive to QoS priorities of the network traffic, especially traffic inbound from the WAN connection.

Even more interesting is the work being done by Atheros on a bandwidth allocation algorithm. The algorithm has the ability to sense multiple incoming data streams, prioritise the data streams according to QoS markers found in individual packets, and apply the appropriate bandwidth to each data stream. Creating an algorithm with this ability is not a trivial task and in my opinion pretty darn cool.

Hardware gets a makeover
Equipment developers are no longer as focused on any single Wi-Fi device, but are beginning to realise the need to consider an entire Wi-Fi network as a symbiotic system requiring a central intelligence.

With that in mind, equipment developers are hard at work making sure their devices will make use of the newly developed intelligence built into the 802.11n chips. Developers are also peering into their crystal balls...

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