The first generation 802.11 wireless market, once struggling to expand, has spread from largely vertical applications such as healthcare, point of sale, and inventory management to become much more broad as a general networking technology being deployed in offices, schools, hotel guest rooms, airport departure areas, airplane cabins, entertainment venues, coffee shops, restaurants, and homes. This has led to the tremendous growth of new sources of IEEE 802.11 devices. IEEE 802.11 equipment is now moving into its second stage, where the wireless LAN is being treated as a large wireless communication system. As a system, there is more to consider than simply the communication over the air between a single access point and the associated mobile devices. This has lead to innovative changes in the equipment that makes up a wireless LAN. The IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A Designer’s Companion, Second Edition is for the system network architects, hardware engineers and software engineers at the heart of this second stage in the evolution of 802.11 wireless LANs and for those designers that will take 802.11 to the next stage.
Bob O'Hara is a co-founder of Airespace, a venture-funded startup company that is leading the IEEE 802.11 industry into the second stage of wireless local area network (WLAN) evolution. He is actively involved in the development of networking, telecommunications, and computing standards and products. His areas of expertise are network and communication protocols and their implementation, operating systems, system specification and integration, standards development, cryptography and its application, strategy development, and product definition. Mr. O'Hara has been involved with the development of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard since 1992. He was the technical editor of that standard and chairman of the revisions and regulatory extensions tasks groups. He is currently chairman of the maintenance and task group. In 2004, he was selected of one of the fifty most powerful people in networking by
Network World.
Al Petrick is vice president of marketing and business development at WiDeFi, a fabless semiconductor company developing 802.11 WiFi® semiconductors for the wireless consumer electronics market. Mr. Petrick's experience includes over 23 years of combined marketing and systems engineering in wireless communications and semiconductor technology. Prior to WiDeFi, he held executive management marketing and business development positions at Icefyre and Intersil. At Intersil, now Conexant, formally Harris Semiconductor, he pioneered the PRISM WLAN chipset from inception into a successful Wi-Fi product line. Mr. Petrick serves as vice chairman of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN Working Group. He has published various marketing and technical papers on wireless communications for leading wireless trade publications, marketing analysts, and financial analysts. Mr Petrick co-authored with Bob O'Hara the first edition of the IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A Designer's Companion. He serves on a number of advisory boards for Wi-Fi product companies.
