Controller-Based Wireless LAN Fundamentals: An end-to-end reference guide to design, deploy, manage, and secure 802.11 wireless networks

Chapter 3. 802.11n

The demand for higher-performance wireless LANs (WLAN) drove the development of the IEEE 802.11n standard. IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11g WLANs support a maximum physical layer data rate of 54 Mbps and approximate application level data rates of 30 Mbps. Many wired applications using higher data rates, such as high-definition video and system backup applications, are slowly migrating to WLANs. The IEEE created the 802.11n standard to provide increased WLAN capacity to meet the requirements for many applications on wired Ethernet networks. The goal of 802.11n was to provide performance parity with 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet over a wireless media. This goal was driven by the state of most wired Ethernet devices supporting 100-Mbps ...