The IEEE 802.11 Standard Series

In communication systems, it is crucial that the interface which controls the information exchange between networked nodes is standardised between different manufacturers. The most important institutions for standardisation in this area are the European Telecommunication Standardisation Institute (ETSI), the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) with the subdivision ITU-T focused on wired communication systems and ITU-R for radio communication systems. The ETSI introduced, for example, the GSM standard for wireless telephones (Global System for Mobile Communication) and initiated the mobile broadband communication standard UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System). In the field of local area networks, the ETSI specified Hiperlan (High Performance LAN) providing data rates up to 2 Mbit/s and Hiperlan/2 (an enhanced version with data rates up to 54 Mbit/s). The IEEE introduced the 802 series of standards which define various kinds of communication networks.