Evolution and Impact of Wi-Fi Technology and Applications: A Historical Perspective
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Evolution and Impact of Wi‑Fi Technology and Applications: A Historical Perspective Kaveh Pahlavan1 · Prashant Krishnamurthy2 Received: 13 August 2020 / Revised: 29 October 2020 / Accepted: 2 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless local area networking (WLAN), commercially known as Wi-Fi, has become a necessity in our day-to-day life. Over a billion Wi-Fi access points connect close to hundred billion of IoT devices, smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, smart TVs, video cameras, monitors, printers, and other consumer devices to the Internet to enable millions of applications to reach everyone, everywhere. The evolution of Wi-Fi technology also resulted in the first commercial piloting of spread spectrum, high speed optical communications, OFDM, MIMO and mmWave pulse transmission technologies, which then became more broadly adopted by cellular phone and wireless sensor networking industries. The popularity and widespread Wi-Fi deployment in indoor areas further motivated innovation in opportunistic cyberspace applications that exploit the ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals. The RF signal radiated from Wi-Fi access points creates an “RF cloud” accessible to any Wi-Fi equipped device hosting or supporting these opportunistic applications. Wi-Fi positioning and location intelligence were the first popular opportunistic applications of Wi-Fi’s RF cloud. Today, researchers are investigating opportunistic applications of Wi-Fi signals for gesture and motion detection as well as authentication and security. This paper provides a holistic overview of the evolution of Wi-Fi technology and its applications as the authors experienced it in the last few decades. Keywords Wi-Fi · Positioning · Cyberspace · RF cloud · Location intelligence · Gesture detection
1 Introduction In the last few decades, as we were witnessing the emergence of the “information age” and the third industrial revolution, wireless access and localization played an undisputable role by enabling millions of innovative and popular cyberspace applications to connect to the Internet by anyone, anywhere1. These cyberspace applications have had and continue to make a fundamental impact on the way we live, conduct business, shop, access news media, deliver education, transport, care for health, and interact with the world. Today, smart phones, tablets and laptops use wireless technology * Kaveh Pahlavan [email protected] Prashant Krishnamurthy [email protected] 1
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA
Department of Information and Networked Systems, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2
to support untethered access to information, which is the most essential part of the way we live and work.2 Smart cities monitor the environment and cyberspace intelligence is helping us as a society to optimize the way our intelligence contributes to the collective intelligence of humanity, to optimize the efficie
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