What are the standard are used in wireless communication
Wirelness standards
Since
the beginning of IEEE 802.11 standard, the wireless networks were evolving at a
significant pace. People saw the potential in this type of data transmission,
therefore 802.11 successors were showing up, few years after each other. The
following table summarizes the current 802.11 standards that are used in our
times:
As you can
see, Wi-Fi networks are becoming faster and faster. Following are a couple of
limiting factors why we don't see high speeds when we download data over Wi-Fi:
·
There is a difference
between the speed and actuals throughout. Since wireless communication is
half-duplex (single antenna can either transmit or receive at one time), the
actual throughput is actually around 50% of the speed. This condition is only
true, when there is one transmitter and one receiver, without any other clients
involved, and without interferences (that leads to collisions and
retransmissions).
·
The most cutting edge standards (802.11ac) are not that
widely supported on end-devices. Most of the laptops or smartphones on the
market provides support for 802.11a/b/g/n, but not yet for 802.11ac standard.
In addition to that, some devices are equipped only with antenna, that supports
2,4 GHz frequency band, but not 5 GHz (that lead to lack of 802.11ac support by
default).
Check Your
Wi-Fi Network Standards
Let us see how you can check what standards are supported on the Wi-Fi
network that you are joined to? You can check that using the number of
approaches. I will present two of them here:
By sniffing for the
wireless beacon frames
·
Every beacon frame contains the list of speeds that are supported by
transmitting AP. Those speeds may be mapped to the standard directly.
· The dump of the beacon frame above indicates that, this is probably
AP, that is enabled for 802.11b/g support on 2,4 GHz frequency band.
·
802.11b supported rates (1, 2, 5.5, 11).
·
802.11g
supported rates (1, 2, 5.5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, 54)
