In the last IEEE meeting I attended I had the good fortune to participate in the celebration of the completion of the work done by the IEEE 802.11k task group. As one of the original co-authors of the specification I had the privilege of attending a very nice celebration dinner. This was very satisfying for me as I attended nearly every IEEE meeting for more than 3 years with one of my key focus areas to complete the job in 802.11k. I am very proud of my contribution to this group and give much thanks to Richard Paine, our group chairman, who remained at the helm for duration of the task group.
For those of you not familiar with this group, we were tasked with standardizing many 802.11 radio measurements that were largely already available in most 802.11 client adapters and in 802.11 network infrastructure. In addition to defining these measurements, we also needed a standard way to exchange the measurement information between the client adapters and the network infrastructure.
The first question that might come to mind is why? The value of radio measurements is unanimously agreed upon in the wireless community. By measuring the RF environment good decisions can be made about both how to manage the wireless network as well as how the wireless network functions. Measurements allow us engineers to develop products that make good decisions about very important RF characteristics such as channels selection, power settings, data rate selection, network selection, etc. By exposing and controlling this information between the network and the client the 802.11 WLAN network simply works better.
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