A global architecture for the Wi-family

International audienceWiMedia, Wi-Fi, WiMax, Wi-Mobile, WiRAN, the Wi-family is getting bigger; so does the network architecture. It is encouraging to see the fast development of the new IEEE wireless technologies promising the ultimate Internet service deployment on wireless and mobile infrastructures since they would offer larger bandwidth at cheaper price compared to the telecommunication wireless radio resource. However it is disquieting to see that the TCP/IP protocol stack which is supposed to be the heart of the Internet services deployment is not evolving as fast as the wireless technologies do. Here we come up with the hard question which is the network performance of the TCP/IP architecture over wireless networks. It is probably too early to decide to replace TCP/IP by another protocol stack for wireless network support, but it is important to not ignore the problem and analyse the main drawbacks of TCP/IP in wireless networks and think about a new architecture of network communication over the wireless networks.This paper provides a brief survey of what we name here the Wi-family wireless technologies, and emphasizes on new network architecture to optimize the TCP/IP behaviour worsen by the wireless characteristics