Q&A: Kelly Davis-Felner, Wi-Fi Alliance senior executive

Felner: The 802.11ac standard will lead to devices that will truly inter-operate with legacy wireless devices

Collaboration forum and device certification body the Wi-Fi Alliance is at the forefront of wireless developments.

Computing talked to senior Wi-Fi Alliance executive Kelly Davis-Felner about wireless technology standards and wireless monitoring of consumer and business energy consumption.

What wireless technologies are under development currently – what comes after the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) 802.11n wireless standard?

We recently signed an agreement with the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig), a body set up to define a specification for Wi-Fi operating in the 60GHz band. [802.11n operates in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio frequency ranges.]

It’s an open standard, designed to operate with legacy forms of Wi-Fi [such as 802.11b], and it will have fallback mechanisms to use the earlier standards, if these new 60GHz-capable devices are not available.

The agreement enables WiGig to contribute its specification to us as a technology source.

WiGig has also contributed that specification to the IEEE, which had a meeting in Beijing a couple of weeks ago, where it agreed that this specification would be the basis of the technology that they were going to use. They’ve tagged it as 802.11ad.

What are the performance characteristics of this wireless technology?

We’re talking about gigabits per second, rather than megabits per second, and WiGig is publicly touting data transfer rates in the range of 7Gbit/s.

Remember, that’s a theoretical performance level, and our certification programme won’t necessarily certify it to that level.

There are no products yet, but we’re talking about a 10 times increase in bandwidth compared with 802.11n end user devices.

As for range, there is normally an inverse relationship between throughput and range.

[802.11ad] is an in-room, home technology. It doesn’t replace 802.11n technology, but is suitable for consumer electronics and digital home-type applications.

For enterprise applications, you’re looking at using it for display applications and videoconferencing, where you have to move a lot of data over a fairly short distance.

Is the Wi-Fi Alliance working on any other wireless technologies?

Some work is being carried out by the IEEE to address two other physical layer networking standards. One is 802.11ac, another high-throughput gigabit standard, which will operate at 5GHz – like 802.11n.

The 802.11ac standard will lead to devices that will truly inter-operate with legacy wireless devices. We will design a certification programme around it, probably within the next few months.

The other technology under development is one working in the ultra-high-frequency (UHF) 800MHz/900MHz radio band. Apologies for the alphabet soup, but the IEEE has designated this one as 802.11af, and they’re re-working existing Wi-Fi protocols to work in this radio band.

This technology uses the opposite end of the frequency range from 60GHz. It does not have the throughput of the 60GHz technology, but it does have a better range, especially for outdoor applications.

The last wireless technology we’re looking at is Wi-Fi Direct.

Could you elaborate on the Wi-Fi Direct technology?

This is a kind of personal area network (PAN)-to-LAN technology. It’s really designed for a device-to-device pipe for synchronising content and display applications.

It can also be used at Wi-Fi ranges to connect straight to printers without having to log on to enterprise active directory domains.

It’s a quick ‘on-the-go pipe’ and the interesting thing from an enterprise standpoint is that you would be able to use enterprise connections. That means not having to log on to the guest Wi-Fi networks and mess about with passwords.

The security angle is that since I can’t get access through standard enterprise domains, it’s more secure. Wi-Fi Direct defines its own security domain and uses the current grade of Wi-Fi security WPA2.

There are also some nice management hooks built into this standard, so that devices can optionally be managed by IT managers. So if I were linking my device to a printer or a video display, IT managers would be able to say which wireless channels I should use, or could say 'get off, I don’t want you on this network link'.

What about smart meters and some wireless technology that addresses this area?

I think there’s an opportunity here to create a comprehensive conservation effort through energy management, which applies to the utility companies as well as consumers.

Wi-Fi comes into it because you can bring these functions back to your laptop, especially since consumers are already using Wi-Fi in their home networks.

If you start putting Wi-Fi chips into your meter, your thermostat and a range of appliances, you have a nice IP platform on which you can build applications.

These can manage power consumption and monitor energy drain for different household appliances, and you'll also be able to remote monitor electrical systems at home and in business.

We think Wi-Fi has a big role to play in smart grid technology, the nice thing about Wi-Fi being that it can be deployed as a low-power solution, but have high performance too.

You could see a long-life battery-powered chip attached to your electricity mains, which wouldn't need to send vast amounts of data.

Are you seeing any interesting trends with wireless devices?

Last year we certified an incredible number of handsets for Wi-Fi, and I think we've reached a tipping point.

We are marching towards a 100 per cent attach rate [whereby all handsets have wireless], similar to that of wireless connectivity on laptops.

We certified 142 per cent more wireless devices last year, and we are on track for another really big leap.

Another interesting trend is that we’re also starting to certify 802.11n on a fair number of handsets.

You don’t get the performance that you do with laptops because there are a number of factors that throttle this performance, but you get a more reliable connection, and from a capacity standpoint, using 802.11n can help with the performance.

Remember that these devices only have a single antenna, so the performance boost through using the multiple antenna feature of 802.11n isn’t there.

The other big trend is a real boost in certifying wireless connectivity on consumer electronic systems. We're certifying lots of TVs, Blu-Ray players and media servers.