Optimising Wi-Fi

-Fi has been astonishingly successful in enabling the rise of mobile Internet access, with a large and growing range of devices supporting. It has become the norm with any fixed broadband service and users value the convenience it provides greatly. However, with the runaway success of Wi-Fi, comes the challenge of improving the end user experience in dense urban areas where access points' coverage areas overlap significantly.

To-date, the main emphasis in WiFi development has been to increase link speeds, as home networking performance expectations (and data intense applications) increase. This has been achieved markedly in 802.11ac which offers headline rates in excess of a gigabit per second. Just the thing if you have fibre to the home or a few 4k video devices to hook up, for example.

Now there is an initaitive referred to as IEEE 802.11 HEW, which aims to improve spectrum reuse efficiency, so that more dense WiFi deployments will be better supported -and better mobile offloading achieved. Initially driven by French operator, Orange, the move is now reported to be backed byHuawei, Broadcom and Qualcomm. The Wi-Fi Alliance is now reported to be studying the market requirements.

The IEEE could form a technical working group to take the development forward around June 2014. Further details in this FierceWireless article.

Light networking

The search for transmission capacity to satisfy the seemly unending thirst for wireless data drives interest in higher frequency bands (tens of Gigaherz), so perhaps the arrival of LiFi (based on modulation of visible light) should not come as too much of a surprise. The principle is that ordinary lighting found in homes and offices is now gradually turning over to LED (Light Emitting Diode) technology. A major advantage that these offer over conventhtional tungsten and flourescent lamps, is that their light output can be modulated at a much greater rate - beyond the perception of the human eye. High modulation rates translate into high data rate and hence network transmission capacity.

This technology is particularly interesting for content distribution, being essential unidirectional. Return paths could be added, possibly using invisible wireless links. Unidirectional content distribution is quite familiar from broadcast networks, where storage can be provided in end-user devices, to enable some degree of choice and interaction. This means that the technology is more likely to complement rather than substitute for bi-directional network technologies such as Wi-Fi.

MarketsandMarkets, a research company, estimates that the market for visible light communications equipment could be worth over $6 billion, by 2018.

A company called Pure VLC, co-founded by Professor Harald Haas from University of Edinburgh, has recently shipped its first £5000 order for a medical application.

Reported in the FT, 11th October 2013

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