Emerging networking trends in wireless technology – By Aditya Abeysinghe
Wi-Fi 5 and higher
Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) has become one of the most common wireless standards used. Several Wi-Fi versions have risen and each version has improved the speed, security, and bandwidth of wireless connections. Wi-Fi 5 was the mostly used version until a few years back and wireless devices that were manufactured in the last few years have supported Wi-Fi 6.
Wi-Fi 6 uses both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency and is often three or four times faster than Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5. Theoretical throughput is often closer to a speed of 9.6 Gbps while Wi-Fi 5 can support only a speed around 3.5 Gbps. Due to this speed, many streaming and gaming applications can operate with less latency when using online services. Wi-Fi 6 also has more security as Simultaneous Authentication of Equals method of authentication is used with Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA2) whereas Wi-Fi 5 and earlier only provide WPA2.
Wi-Fi 7 is not used in commercial wireless networks and it is currently under development. Wi-Fi 7 is even faster than Wi-Fi 6 with speeds of a minimum of 30 Gbps. These will highly benefit mixed reality and real-time based services. Wi-Fi 7 also uses 6 GHz frequency which can be used to transmit across all bands and devices can use these bands and change the band while using a connection.
Vehicle Ad-hoc networks
Smart vehicles have various communication methods with other vehicles, pedestrians, and road-side networking devices. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication uses several short range and/or long range wireless networking methods. While most of such methods are used currently, use of communications in ad-hoc methods have also grown. One such method is Wireless 802.11bd standard which enables vehicles to share data in ad-hoc network methods. This provides high bandwidth and high speed networks over current methods of wireless data sharing in vehicles.
Focus on privacy in current standards
Current wireless standards have less functions to enhance user privacy and users have to ensure that their privacy is not attacked. Several methods to improve user privacy have been used and adopted for non-commercial applications. 802.11aq was one standard that improved privacy on top of current Wi-Fi standard. While this method increased Media Access Control (MAC) address based privacy, many security flaws were found within the method. Many other methods such as 802.11bh and 802.11bi have been proposed to fix issues in the early method.
