Wi-Fi Evolution
An Integral Part of the Wireless Landscape
With millions of hotspots deployed around the world, and ever growing integration of Wi-Fi into wireless devices, Wi-Fi is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. It is part of the solutions to the blooming 1000x mobile data challenge, and a universal technology in the connected home space. Wi-Fi is also targeting new opportunities such as wireless display, indoor positioning and more.
Wi-Fi plays an important role in in addressing the 1000x challenge by opportunistically offloading data from 3G/4G macro networks. The next-gen 802.11ac offers 3x increase in throughput per stream, and takes it ever further with the future MU-MIMO support.
Virtually all the newer smartphones support Wi-Fi, and most of the 3G/4G small cells are expected to be integrated with Wi-Fi. Hence, industry is hard at work to make the interworking between 3G/4G and Wi-Fi robust and seamless.
Qualcomm’s device and small cell chipset solutions not only support the standards mandated interworking features but also pack many more advanced algorithms.
The diverse nature of the devices that are part of the “connected home” requires a range of connectivity technologies. Among all these, Wi-Fi is a universal technology effectively supporting all the major components of the connected home system, be it multimedia devices, life managements, home operators or anything else.
Qualcomm’s Hy-Fi™ solutions that combine mobility and flexibility of Wi-Fi with reliability and range of power line communication (PLC) play a major role in realizing the connected home vision.
Wi-Fi and its evolution, apart from the its traditional role in offloading data and connected home, is also poised to make an impact in the relatively nascent areas of wireless display and indoor positioning.
Wi-Fi is in fact the foundation air link technology for all the wireless display solutions. The current solutions use Wi-Fi direct, part of 802.11n/ac and the future ones could adopt 11ad/WiGig which leverage bandwidth-rich 60 GHz spectrum.
Wi-Fi is an effective technology for indoor positioning. Qualcomm’s industry leading Izat positioning solution, incorporates Wi-Fi for indoor positioning.
