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Bluetooth Articles Wireless
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Welcome to our listings of HomeRF and Shared Wireless Access Protocol
(SWAP) articles, white papers and other documents of interest.
A new class of mobile consumer devices using PC’s and the Internet
has been made possible with the advent of HomeRF. In telecommunications,
cable modems and xDSL are often referred to as being the last mile. In
that context, HomeRF could be referred to as the last 50 metres. HomeRF
has received the backing of many corporate stakeholders for networking
within the home. HomeRF makes use of the existing PC industry
infrastructure, as well as the Internet, TCP-IP and Ethernet. A standard
is also available in HomeRF, which offers a way to connect to the PSTN
for voice telephony. HomeRF, SWAP compliant systems are already
available. Future specifications of SWAP are currently being researched
and developed. It is envisaged that these future specifications will
offer increased security and higher data rates.
Proxim and other companies are putting some heavy support behind an
improved version of HomeRF (version 2.0) that will likely carve itself a
healthy niche in the home networking market. Like its predecessor,
HomeRF 2.0 has been engineered with the home user in mind so setup and
use is much easier than other wireless solutions like 802.11b. As a
networking standard, HomeRF 2.0 strives to be easy to use without
compromising a robust feature set. Use of a HomeRF 2.0 network will be a
transparent function of your computing environment. The HomeRF 2.0
standard includes support for advanced networking features like
security, interference dodging and quality of service – all
transparent to the end user.
The market for home networking will soon see rapid
growth. In addition to traditional data networking, this market will be
driven by the desire of consumers to have access to multimedia audio,
video, and gaming services. The Quality of Service (QoS) requirements
these demands have put on home networking technologies has led to new
standardization activities designed to deliver the QoS consumers will
demand. In this paper we discuss the many ways in which QoS can be
delivered, and then focus on the specific attributes of the HomeRF
standard that enable it to deliver high QoS voice and multimedia
services over a wireless home networking infrastructure.
Of the three major technologies available for this
band, only HomeRF is designed with a frequency agile physical layer and
robust upper layer protocols to combat 2.4 GHz interference. This is
what makes HomeRF the ideal wireless LAN technology for the home
environment. HomeRF is the most interference immune of the three major
2.4 GHz wireless LAN standards The unlicensed 2.4 GHz band has become
one of the most active communications bands in the RF spectrum. As
market demand for LANs extends from the corporate to the home
environment, 2.4 GHz wireless LAN equipment is being produced and
purchased in greater volumes than ever before. In the home environment
the HomeRF standard is emerging as the leading technology. The IEEE
802.11b standard is making strong inroads into the corporate
environment. And finally, though initially designed as a cable
replacement technology and not a wireless LAN, Bluetooth devices are
expected to be showing up in the 2.4 GHz band by the hundreds of
millions . As more devices are deployed into this unlicensed band, the
interference immunity of those devices will become increasingly
important to technology adopters.
Though the possibility of attacks similar to those
leveled at 802.11b systems exist in theory for HomeRF systems, the
relative level of difficulty is very different. HomeRF is stronger in
preventing unauthorized access due to its frequency hopping technology
and since attempts are not enabled by commercially available equipment.
The security of wireless LANs has recently become an area of much
concern. Several popular articles 1 and academic papers 2 have
identified security concerns with the IEEE 802.11 standard.
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HomeRF.org Technical
Summary of the SWAP Specification (Zipped PDF)
The HomeRF Shared Wireless Access Protocol (SWAP)
system is designed to carry both voice and data traffic and to
interoperate with the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the
Internet; it operates in the 2400MHz band and uses a digital frequency
hopping spread spectrum radio. The SWAP technology was derived from
extensions of existing cordless telephone (Digital Enhanced Cordless
Telephone or DECT) and wireless LAN technology to enable a new class
of home cordless services. It supports both a TDMA (Time Division
Multiple Access) service to provide delivery of interactive voice and
other time-critical services, and a CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple
Access/Collision Avoidance) service for delivery of high speed packet
data.
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HomeRF.org Wireless
for the Broadband Home (Zipped PDF)
This white paper examines three candidate wireless
networking standards, HomeRF, Bluetooth and IEEE802.11, against the
needs of service providers and consumers for the Broadband Internet
home. The clear choice for this specific application based upon
technical merit is shown here to be HomeRF. Only HomeRF provides
simultaneous support for up to 8 toll-quality voice connections, 8
prioritized streaming media sessions and multiple Internet and network
resource connections at Broadband speeds. And HomeRF accomplishes this
with excellent comparative ratings for low cost, small size, low power
consumption, interference immunity, security and support for high
network density.
Significant changes are occurring in the way people
communicate at home. Internet usage, now at 80 million users worldwide,
has quadrupled since 1996. Already nearly 40% of all US households are
“online”. Use of PCs for computing, communicating, and entertaining
is so pervasive that more than 20 million U.S. households now have more
than one PC. In addition, the mobility of laptop computers provides
users an easy way of carrying work between home and office. In fact, as
many as 60% of all laptops routinely travel between these locations.
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