June 2003
Intermediate to advanced
184 pages
5h 8m
English
Content preview from Building Wireless Community Networks, Second EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Introduction to the Technology
802.11 is a standards group under the IEEE that develops standards related to wireless and wired Ethernet transmission. This includes the actual physical layer, including 802.11a and 802.11b modulation schemes.
802.11b is a Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum technology that, in the United States, occupies 11 channels centered on frequencies in the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band from 2.412 to 2.462GHz, in 5MHz steps. The spectrum used by a single 802.11b signal is 22MHz wide. Because the channels are smaller than the occupied bandwidth, only three channels (1, 6, and 11) can be used in a small area without running into interference.
802.11a doesn’t use Direct Sequence. Instead it uses a modulation scheme called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). OFDM uses 52 300KHz-wide carriers grouped into one 20MHz-wide channel. The slower symbol speed of OFDM and the forward error correction incorporated into 802.11a make it more resilient to multi-path and interference. However, because 802.11a is broadcast at more than double the frequency of 802.11b, there is greater free space loss. An 802.11a installation with gain antennas and powered transmitters has a signal strength that is about 18 percent weaker than that of a similar 802.11b setup.
While 802.11b occupies the portion of the ISM band at 2.4GHz, 802.11a can occupy either the ISM band at 5.8GHz (5.725 to 5.850GHz), or a section of spectrum known as the Unlicensed National Information ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.