Evolution of Home Wireless Networking

                                                                Evolution of Home Wireless Networking

Home networking has evolve and steadily growing becoming more beneficial in our daily transaction. This paper will describe the main areas of home networking. First of all, we need to determine wireless technologies including bandwidth, operating range, and the wireless connection we are connecting or will be using. Today home network can support multiple applications running on different devices, such as personal computers, laptops, printers, scanners, entertaining systems, digital videos, and other household appliances and gadget. We can divide our home networks into two categories. For example, wired and wireless connection. Recently 1GBit/s successor replaced the slower 100Mbit/s Ethernet technology. With the wireless technologies full of competitors. Consumer who chooses to install home network will prefer not to punch any hole on the wall, but use new wireless solution instead such as HomePNA, and Homeplug. However such technologies are much more expensive and data rates are lower than wireless network. In addition home network rarely not connected to any other networks or doesn’t offer subnetworks.

Networking areas can be group into four categories such as Personal Area Network (PAN), Local Area Network (PAN), Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), and Wide Area Networks (WAN). A personal area network is a computer network that connect devices, such as cell phones, portable gaming consoles, and personal digital assistant. PAN is widely used for interconnections between mobile devices of different person. It also offer users to synchronize data on their personal devices and option to connect by either using USB and Firewire for wired net and, using IRDA and Bluetooth as wireless. Local area network (LAN) is a computer network that handles a small geographic area. For example, a home, an office, or group of buildings that provides high transmission rate. Wired LAN are based on switched IEEE 802.3 Ethernet technology running at 10, 100, 1000 Mbit/s. Metropolitan area network (MAN) can cover a city. The structure usually work based on a wireless technology or optical fiber connections. In addition we can convert several LAN connected to each other and have a metropolitan area network. MAN runs with IEEE 802-2001 standards and can be considered optimized for a larger geographical area, ranging from several building to entire city. MAN also depends on communications channels of moderate to high data rates. Wide area network is the largest networking area typically communications links of such networks cross metropolitan, regional or national boundaries. All current and future cellular technologies such as GSM, 3G/WCDMA, and CDMA2000 belongs to the WAN categories.

In conclusion, home networks are common and most home users install wireless networks. These networks allow users to share data, and programs. The transmission of data through a computer network is accomplished by dividing the data to be sent into smaller units. A personal area network (PAN) is a computer network that describes devices other than personal computers that communicate at a distance. A local area network (LAN) is an interconnection of computers that are typically located relatively close to each other. A wide area network (WAN) connects computers and networks over a larger geographical area than a LAN and MAN, even spanning regions, countries, and globe.