Lantronix – The freedom of wireless – Part three – Bringing your wireless up to standard (Lantronix Wireless)

Nov 9 2011 - New Technologies and Energy Harvesting [More New Technologies and Energy Harvesting Articles]

The real-world examples of the value of wireless prove that businesses of all types are finding that wireless networks meet the high availability and capacity requirements needed for their specific applications. Once a decision is made to deploy a wireless system, the overriding question then becomes one of standards.

Today’s popular wireless-networking standards are various and can prove very difficult to choose between. There are, however, important differences that are worth exploring in greater detail:

900MHz technology This is an unlicensed spectrum that has been commonly and traditionally used for portable phones, microwaves and wireless internet services.

Internationally, the 900MHz band is widely used for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile telephone systems or military communications. As a result, companies with sites around the globe cannot standardise on 900MHz-based solutions for all locations. But the 900MHz band suffers from a lack of interoperability, as vendors employ proprietary radio protocols. The industry, on the other hand, is moving towards standards-based systems, with multi-vendor support for common WLAN infrastructures. By contrast, Wi-Fi consumers are not restricted to a single vendor for upgrades and expansion of their WLAN systems.

Wi-Fi In a mixed wireless network environment, it is important to select standards- based wireless products that are able to exchange and use information. Wi-Fi is a generic term that refers to any type of 802.11 network, the term is promoted by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Therefore, any products tested and approved as ‘Wi-Fi Certified’ by the Wi-Fi Alliance are certified as interoperable with each other, even if they are from different manufacturers. A user with a Wi-Fi Certified product can also use any brand of access point with any other brand of client hardware that is also Wi-Fi certified. Users benefit from this interoperability by not being locked into one vendor’s solution.

Bluetooth Named after the Viking, Harald Bluetooth, bluetooth is a short-range (10 metre) frequency-hopping protocol that links devices. Designed to operate in noisy frequency environments, bluetooth uses a fast acknowledgement and frequency-hopping scheme to make a link robust. It avoids interference from other signals by hopping to a new frequency after transmitting or receiving a packet. Compared with other systems in the same frequency band, bluetooth hops faster and uses shorter packets. As a short-range, low-cost, wireless solution, bluetooth requires less operating power than most other devices. However, because it shares a specific radio spectrum, there is potential for interference with consumer appliances that operate in the same spectrum, such as cordless phones, microwaves and baby monitors.

By Martin Poppelaars, VP EMEA sales, Lantronix

Part four (concluding) – Embedding the right technology partner – next week.

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