As Wi-Fi (news - alert) deployments continue to saturate residences, enterprises, and public spaces, a number of new applications for WLAN (define - news - alert) are being discovered. Standardized as 802.11b with up to 11 Mpbs in bandwidth, Wi-Fi was originally considered a simple Ethernet replacement for home and business computer networks and for industrial mobile computing for data centric communication and applications. During recent months, however, the cost reduction and capabilities of Wi-Fi have made it a compelling solution for many consumer electronic devices that were previously not connected to WLANs.

Among these systems are cell phones, PDAs, (news - alert) sensors, VoIP (define - news - alert) cordless phones, wireless audio speakers, cameras and peripheral video game controls. With the 802.11g extension of the standard providing for bandwidth up to 54 Mbps, Wi-Fi becomes even more favorable for home video. This market offers a rich field for expansion of Wi-Fi, gives home users wireless connectivity to LCD TVs, DVD recorders, digital camcorders and other types of client equipment. In addition, some systems traditionally found in offices such as wireless printers, projectors, and network attached storage (NAS) devices are beginning to see more usage in the home and will extend the utility of Wi-Fi.

Despite its recent advances, Wi-Fi technology is not yet ready to support the scale of delivery, especially of video, that most consumers would demand. Further development is needed not only in the hardware, but also in the transmission standards. Foreseeing enormous potential in the home video market, major companies in the wireless networking, consumer electronics, computer, semiconductor and entertainment industries are joining forces to resolve the outstanding issues and create a favorable environment for equipment development. With this push from the industry, consumers can expect to see a whole new range of wireless products for home video within the next few years.

However, there are several important technical and design challenges to be resolved before wireless streaming video can proliferate in consumer electronics. Above all, the equipment has to be easy to set up and use because few consumers have the necessary expertise or patience to deal with difficult installation and operation. An important ease of use aspect is interoperability.  Units from different vendors have to be interoperable. Already, wireless consumer video products are appearing on the shelves, but because these items use proprietary communications, each equipment item has to be bundled with others from the same manufacturer. This situation will have to change because consumers want to shop for devices without compatibility worries.

Many of these issues are already being addressed by the Digital Home Working Group (DHWG), (news - alert) an industry-wide organization dedicated to promoting interoperability among electronic products in the home. DHWG is scheduled to release its first set of guidelines in June, and products following those guidelines may be expected in the coming months.

For video, which must be delivered in real-time, quality of service is an important issue for consumer Wi-Fi. And since bandwidth will be limited within a given household, QoS (define - news - alert) has to be coupled with prioritization. For example, will Mom’s movie take precedence over the kids’ video game? As long as the equipment offers a consistent method for prioritizing usage, consumers will have the means to decide who has access to the household bandwidth.

Personal privacy concerns are also being addressed through security enhancements in today’s Wi-Fi networks. Since Wi-Fi information is readily available to everyone within the transmission radius, security is needed to prevent non-authorized users from stealing bandwidth and data from the WLAN. Security issues are addressed by the IEEE 802.11i (news - alert) committee by such standards as AES (news - alert) and EAP. (news - alert) For the physical medium, the 802.11n committee addresses issues of bandwidth, throughput and operating range -- all of which are significant concerns when trying to support multiple high quality video streams in the home. 

The importance of resolving content protection issues cannot be overstated, since consumers will not buy wireless video equipment unless content is made available and the entertainment industry will not supply movies, games and so forth unless these can be protected against copyright infringement. To protect valuable content, various content protection standards exist and continue to emerge.  Among these content protection standards are CPPM  for pre-recorded digital audio, CPRM (news - alert) for recordable audio and video, CSS (news - alert) for DVD movies, DTCP (news - alert) for compressed video and HDCP (news - alert) for raw video.  In addition, Digital Rights Management (DRM) (news - alert)  systems may be layered on top of the content protection standards to allow and enforce rights like how many times the content can be played, for what time period it can be played, etc.  It is likely that the DHWG will define or adopt a DRM system for the digital home.

Content protection and rights management concerns will eventually provoke changes in video distribution practices, just as they have in the last few years for music distribution. Another concern is that multiple standards increase the device complexity and cost. Today, a media adapter will need to implement all content protection standards in order to render all protected content. An emerging “transcription” standard called DTCP over IP (DTCP/IP) will convert all different kinds of content protection to a single DTCP/IP standard, enabling a thin client media adapter to deal with one standard. Another benefit of DTCP over IP is that, since additional content protection standards may emerge over time, a standard transcryption between the media server and digital adapter can increase the longevity of the media adapter and protect personal investment.

Finally, there are the issues related to equipment design. Whatever the units are – LCD displays that hang on the wall, media adapters that connect to TV and Internet sources, DVD players and recorders, or anything else – they must be at a price point that will meet the budget requirements of today’s savvy and price conscious consumers. Because many of these devices are used in a variety of configurations, they will need to support different communications standards, complete with hardware interfaces and offer preloaded or automatically downloadable software. Portable wireless units will have to be lightweight, as small as possible, and designed to minimize power consumption so that users can get the longest possible operation from a single battery charge.

Hardware technology issues

While the transmission issues must be resolved by committee, those of hardware depend on the available IC (news - alert) technology. Fortunately, the fundamentals are already in place. Digital signal processing speeds today are more than sufficient for video compression/decompression, data encryption/decryption, and the various decoding stages involved in wireless transmission and reception. The trend, of course, is to make systems smaller, more robust and less power hungry, so today’s technology is only an indicator of what will come. As the standards firm up, manufacturers of consumer electronics will expect the products offered by semiconductor vendors to help them meet the challenges discussed above.

The need for interoperability requires that ICs integrate support for the full range of common form factors, including mini-PCI, compact flash, and other standard modules. Power optimization will matter enormously for portable equipment and will differ depending on whether the device is available continuously or intermittently for communications. A networked PDA, for instance, might always be ready, while a portable media player might wake up occasionally for downloads, then turn itself off again.

Size is also important for portable media devices. IC size is usually a matter of how much functionality is integrated. Some vendors have more types of functions available to them than others, and some are more advanced in integrating, say, analog technology on chip with complex digital functions. Performance, of course, is important in all systems, though a media server that may handle a number of clients throughout the network is likely to have higher performance requirements than the clients themselves. Cost, always a key consideration in mass-market consumer items, depends on the levels of integration and performance.

All of these factors indicate that semiconductor vendors will strive to offer complete solutions for the emerging consumer Wi-Fi market. Just as consumers want the equipment to plug in and work, equipment manufacturers want IC solutions that do everything necessary to help them build competitive products. As a result, the most successful solutions will be those from companies who have in their portfolios central components such as baseband gateways and video engines, as well as proven technology for integrating complete system functionality around those basic components with Wi-Fi. In-depth expertise in wireless networking and video is also essential to understanding the requirements of system design and building solutions that meet them.

At this point, the consumer Wi-Fi market is just opening up, but as soon as a few key issues have been resolved, it should become an area of rapid growth. When the industry has agreed how to make home WLAN devices interoperable and transmissions secure, manufacturers will be able to build the systems that consumers demand. In the meantime, semiconductor vendors are busy lining up the elements of the underlying technology in order to provide complete solutions. Once the technical issues are settled, home wireless networks will undergo some rapid changes.

Remi El-Ouazzane is the Director of Operations for Texas Instruments Wireless Networking Business Unit.

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