August 8, 2003
(IDG News Service)
Home and small-business users looking to connect bandwidth-hungry audio and visual devices will appreciate a new standard from Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) for streaming multimedia data over high-speed wireless networks.
The 802.15.3 standard for high-rate wireless personal-area networks (WPAN) allows networks to link as many as 245 wireless fixed and portable devices at data rates of up to 55Mbit/sec. and distances of up to 300 feet, the IEEE said Wednesday in a statement.
The standard, which substantially increases the initial 1Mbit/sec. speed of WPANs, comes in response to strong demand, the IEEE said. Users want to connect multiple portable devices at low cost, yet run high-bandwidth applications such as multimedia, digital images and high-quality video. The standard also addresses user priorities such as network economy, frequency performance, power consumption and data-rate scalability, the IEEE said.
To keep user costs low, the IEEE limited the need for external components and allowed the radio and protocol to appear on no more than two chips that fit within a compact flash card, it said.
The new WPAN standard uses the 2.4-GHz unlicensed frequency band and specifies raw data rates of 11M, 22M, 33M, 44M and 55Mbit/sec.
Distance plays a role in transmission speed. The closer a device is to an access point, the higher the bandwidth gets. For instance, a device that's less than 150 feet away from an access point can transmit data at 55Mbit/sec., but the transmission speed of a device 300 feet away drops to 22Mbit/sec.
The highest rate, 55Mbit/sec., is necessary for low-latency, multimedia connections and large-file transfers, while 11M and 22Mbit/sec. rates are ideal for long-range connectivity for audio devices, the IEEE said.
Moreover, 802.15.3 offers reliable quality of service, the IEEE said. It uses Time Division Multiple Access to allocate channel time among devices to prevent conflicts and provides new allocations for an application only if enough bandwidth is available.
Fixed and portable devices in a WPAN connect in an ad hoc way and communicate by peer-to-peer networking, allowing them to connect without user intervention. The Advanced Encryption Standard, approved by the U.S. government in 2001 to replace the Data Encryption Standard, ensures that data is protected in the network.
The 802.15.3 standard allows networks based on this specification to coexist with other 802.15 WPANs, such as Bluetooth systems, and with 802.11 wireless LANs, especially 802.11b and 802.11g, which also operate in the 2.4-GHz band.