Wireless LAN

Wireless communication has made great strides over the past few years. In some areas of the world, there are more wireless communication devices than human beings. In places like Finland the majority of the telephone access lines are wireless. Commuter trains in metropolitan areas of the United States often have so many wireless phones ringing at once that it is impossible to tell whose is ringing. Global telephone service was introduced about three years ago using wireless technology and low orbiting satellites. Developments of wireless data networks/wireless LAN have proceeded a bit slower due to the higher bandwidth and higher data integrity requirements of data packets for some data applications. In voice communication, the occasional loss of a voice packet will not be noticed by the user. However, the lost of a packet when transmitting a binary file that contains executable code can be disastrous. Wireless LAN is the next frontier that we need to conquer in the networking world. Much progress has occurred over the last three years, but we still lack the degree of standardization and robustness that would make wireless LAN ubiquitous. There are many issues associated with wireless communication and mobile stations. Some of these issues are: 1) the use of licensed or unlicensed frequencies for communication, 2) the topology of the network, 3) the coverage area and interference characteristics of the type of transmission used, 4) the relative speed with which the mobile station moves, 5) authentication of users, 6) privacy and security of transmitted data, 7) protocols used at the various network layers and 8) hierarchy and organization of fixed and mobile stations. In this paper I will discuss these issues and attempt to explain why developments of wireless LANs may be progressing a bit slower than some would expect. The operation of wireless and wired networks will be contrasted throughout the paper.