Wireless Protocol Standards - Essay Example

WAP also brought in improved security factors propagated by mobility. If we look into the areas where WAP based services is used today it can be said that it is used in banking services, stock exchange, hotel reservations, bus schedules, Internet access and e-mail, will be accessible by general mobile phones. WAP helps easy and quick delivery of relevant information and services to mobile users with wireless terminals. However, the main disadvantage is that it comes with limited displays and data transfer capabilities.

In fact WAP is an arrangement that is made for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way in which cellular devices use Internet access, together with World Wide Web, news groups, e-mail and IRC (Paukkunen, 1999). Over the years several such standards have evolved and this paper intends to discuss some of them in detail. 802.11 standards: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the year 1997 created the first WLAN standard and it was named 802.11 after the name of the group formed to oversee its development.

However, soon the disadvantage of using 802.11 came into picture and it was found that 802.11 only supported a maximum network bandwidth of 2 Mbps. As a result of this the information transfer was too slow for most applications. Today, ordinary 802.11 wireless products are no longer manufactured due to the lack of demand (Mitchell, 2008). 802.11b: As the technology advanced IEEE expanded on the original 802.11 standard in July 1999 and created the 802.11b specification. It was found that 802.

11b supports bandwidth up to 11 Mbps when comparable to traditional Ethernet. Similar to 802.11, 802.11b uses the unregulated radio signalling frequency (2.4 GHz). As a result of lower frequencies, this is common among vendors particularly to lower their production costs. The use of 802.11b has some disadvantages. For instance, being unregulated, 802.11b device can incur hindrance from other devices such as