Chapter 8. Applications and Deployment of Wireless Technology

Wireless technology is seeing widespread deployment in many types of environments, which are roughly classifiable into the following categories:

• Personal-Area Networks

• Home and Small Office (SOHO) deployments

• Medium-to-Large Enterprise deployments

• Wireless "last-mile" carrier deployments

• Wireless "hotspots"

The first bullet is supported by standards from IEEE 802.15, whereas the second and third are both different applications of IEEE 802.11 with the difference being the scale of the deployment. IEEE 802.11 technology is also pertinent to the final bullet. The fourth bullet is the domain of IEEE 802.16, "Fixed Broadband Wireless Access." IEEE 802.16 is specifically designed with capabilities that make it more suitable to operation on the scale of metropolitan areas, which makes the protocol quite different from IEEE 802.11. However, the payoff is that it is more scalable, and it has features that are specifically designed to support this type of application, including support for security and for different grades of service.

Other emerging wireless networking standards will address mobile broadband wireless networking. The IEEE 802.16 WG (Task Group "e") and the IEEE 802.20 WG are both creating standards based on unique approaches. At this point, adding mobile broadband wireless access to the previous bulleted list would be premature, but this technology will be maturing over the next several years.