Review of 802.11 based Wireless Local Area Networks and Contemporary Standards: Features, Issues and Research Objectives

Wireless local area network (WLAN) provides robust high quality service at a low cost and is a an essential part of everyday web browsing, file exchange, texting, e-mailing and to access live audio/video streams at homes, in public places such parks and airports, and in private places such as offices, enterprise environments, retail stores, and hotels. The adoption of the technology is also increasing in services providing emergency relief measures and in service mechanisms of public safety to ensure quick channel access for several emergency situations at the same time with critical assurances of a hard-and-fast guaranteed quality of service (QoS). The technology is being developed for guaranteed high rates of transmissions for the future of large scale wide area networks implemented at present using mostly wired networks. The advantages of wireless local area networks (WLANs) over wired local area network are many including the ease of fast network access and have at the same time several challenges in providing signal stability, issues of security provisioning, and ensuring usage based on scalable environments. In this paper we investigate in the WLANs the various existing problems, the challenges faced in solving these problems, and the direction of current research activities in providing Quality of Service.