IEEE 802.11n-2009

IEEE 802.11n-2009, commonly shortened to 802.11n, is a wireless networking standard that uses multiple antennas to increase data rates. It is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11-2007 wireless networking standard. Its purpose is to improve network throughput over the two previous standards—802.11a and 802.11g—with a significant increase in the maximum net data rate from 54 Mbit/s to 600 Mbit/s (slightly higher gross bit rate including for example error-correction codes, and slightly lower maximum throughput) with the use of four spatial streams at a channel width of 40 MHz. 802.11n standardized support for multiple-input multiple-output, frame aggregation, and security improvements, among other features. It can be used in the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz frequency bands.

802.11 is a set of IEEE standards that govern wireless networking transmission methods. They are commonly used today in their 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.11ac versions to provide wireless connectivity in homes and businesses. Development of 802.11n began in 2002, seven years before publication. The 802.11n protocol is now Clause 20 of the published IEEE 802.11-2012 standard.

IEEE 802

IEEE 802 refers to a family of IEEE standards dealing with local area networks and metropolitan area networks.

More specifically, the IEEE 802 standards are restricted to networks carrying variable-size packets. By contrast, in cell relay networks data is transmitted in short, uniformly sized units called cells. Isochronous networks, where data is transmitted as a steady stream of octets, or groups of octets, at regular time intervals, are also out of the scope of this standard. The number 802 was simply the next free number IEEE could assign, though “802” is sometimes associated with the date the first meeting was held — February 1980.

The services and protocols specified in IEEE 802 map to the lower two layers (Data Link and Physical) of the seven-layer OSI networking reference model. In fact, IEEE 802 splits the OSI Data Link Layer into two sub-layers named Logical Link Control (LLC) and Media Access Control (MAC), so that the layers can be listed like this: