차세대 IEEE 802.11 무선 랜 기술

Abstract

In recent years, the dependency on Wi-Fi technology in our daily lives has been growing due to the widespread Wi-Fi enabled devices. In particular, the advent of IEEE 802.11n, the most popular IEEE 802.11 WLAN technology today, has enabled data transmissions at hundreds of Mbps. On the other hand, several IEEE 802.11 standardization projects have newly established by IEEE 802.11 Working Group to keep up with the increasing demand for more advanced technologies. By looking over the topics discussed in these ongoing projects, the expected improvements of the next-generation IEEE 802.11 WLAN technologies can be classified into three aspects. Firstly, IEEE 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11ad are under development to increase the throughput so that high-quality bandwidth-hungry applications, e.g., HD video streaming, can be supported. IEEE 802.11af and IEEE 802.11ah, on the other hand, focus on the long range transmissions utilizing sub-1 GHz frequency bands. Lastly, IEEE 802.11ai and IEEE 802.11aq aim to enhance user friendliness by reducing initial link setup delay and providing pre-association service discovery, respectively. In this paper, we firstly review the development of the existing IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi technologies, and then present the status and major technical issues of the aforementioned ongoing standardizations of the next-generation Wi-Fi technologies.