Paving the Way for Gigabit Networking
Jean-Pierre Ebert, Eckhard Grass, Ralf Irmer, Rolf Kraemer, Gerhard Paul Fettweis, Karl Strom, Günther Tränkle, W. Wirnitzer, Reimund Witmann, Hans-Jürgen Reumerman, Egon Schulz, Martin Weckerle, Peter Egner, Ulrich Barth · 2001
Wired LANs soared to the gigabit level some years ago, and terabit networks are in place for wide area networking. However, in terms of data rate, wireless short-range networks tend to lag one generation behind wired LANs. The recent second generation of wireless short-range networks offers transmission rates of up to 54 Mb/s. The third wireless LAN generation is under development and will materialize in the IEEE 802.11n standard in about two years. IEEE 802.11n WLANs will offer a few hundred megabits per second, but the performance gap from wired networks remains. The recently started project Wireless Gigabit with Advanced Multimedia (WIGWAM) aims to close this gap with a heterogeneous 1 Gb/s fourth-generation system based on high-data-rate orthogonal OFDM transmission, MIMO, and efficient MAC protocol techniques.