Wireless standards a la carte

Anything, anywhere, anytime, the query is not new. Still, the slogan having celebrated its 10th anniversary, today ubiquitous broadband wireless communication bringing multimedia services is definitely on its way.

Given the diversity in geographical environment, terminals, and services, there is not one ideal wireless standard to cover all scenarios. Today however, the variety of wireless standards is huge, and together they can offer the desired technology for almost any service, following Darwin’s philosophy for wireless communications: not the strongest one will survive, but the fittest.

This presentation will bring an overview of current and emerging wireless standards. Different generation cellular standards offer ever more mobility and capacity (evolving from GSM to GPRS and EDGE, to true 3G cellular referred to as UMTS). Complementary, standards originally targeting wireless computer networks offer a high capacity in a quasi-static local area (WLANs following the IEEE802.11 standardization effort, commonly known as WiFi, which are exploited in home, office, and hot-spot environments), and for low-mobility metropolitan area networks (IEEE 802.16 family, also referred to as WiMAX).

On much shorter rangers, extremely high datarate wireless interfaces (WiMedia) can replace cables without the traditional speed penalty. The Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) and Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards systems bring wireless audio and video at excellent quality, with the recent DVB-h specifically extending the service to highly mobile handheld terminals.

This Webinar was canceled due to reduced interest.