An Introduction to Wireless Networks.

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An Introduction to Wireless Networks

Introduction

Demand for wireless networks has grown with the development of Mobile hardware, such as mobile phones, laptops and PDA's. With this demand has come industry standards and affordable, lightweight wireless networking hardware. This website will introduce you to the media of in wireless networking, give you an in depth look at Wireless Local area networks (LAN), familiarise you with the Industry standards and Issues.

Wireless Media

Wireless connections all use some form of Radio Frequency (RF) technology, using air as the transmission medium instead of a wire to transmit and receive data.

There are 5 categories generally used for networks.

Radio - this term is used to encompass frequencies between 3MHz- 1 GHz and covers radio broadcasting, mobile telephony at (1khz) and various data networking applications such as cordless phones to baby monitors. Its use in computer networks is limited to applications such as Bluetooth, a developing industry standard that allow any sort of electronic equipment (cell phones, keyboards, headphones) to make its own wireless connections.

However, radio is not used for Local area network an or wide area network's (WAN) because of its low bandwidth.

Satellite - transmissions from microwave (5.925- 6.425 GHz) from stations to and from a satellite orbiting above the earth. The satellites orbit at a fixed altitude and must remain in contact with their partner satellites and stations. Satellite operates at very high bandwidths but is extremely costly and complicated. For these reasons this architecture is exclusively used for WAN's.

Infrared- used for short-distance networks that are in direct line of sight. This medium can be operated at speeds of 4 Mbps or less. And Used in point 2 point and multipoint applications within a confined area e.g. a single room. IrDA (Infrared Data Association) is the standard for...