The Wi-Fi Alliance named "Halow" for Low-Power Wi-Fi"

The Wi-Fi Alliance named "Halow" for Low-Power Wi-Fi"

A few days ago, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the certification program at the Consumer Electronics exhibition in Las Vegas, USA. When enterprises purchase a Wi-Fi Halow product, they can ensure that the product uses 802.11ah technology developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE.

Lisa Phifer, technical consultant at Core Compentence, said: "This is very important because it provides global standards for interoperable, low-power Wan ."

Wi-Fi-enabled IoT devices include electrical and entertainment facilities at home, automotive information entertainment Electronic Products and engine monitoring sensors, and medical devices in medical institutions. Certain devices in the manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and public transport sectors can also use Wi-Fi to connect to the Internet.

Low-Power Wi-Fi advocates believe that this technology has more advantages than the wireless technology currently used by IoT devices. These technologies include Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, and Z-Wave.

Advantages of low-power Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi benefits include ubiquitous connections. Most enterprises already have Wi-Fi infrastructure, so increasing support for IoT devices does not require learning new wireless technologies.

In addition, increasing the number of IoT devices does not burden the existing network, because these devices only occasionally send a small amount of data. In addition, Wi-Fi technology provides security in the chipset that supports wireless access points (AP.

From a technical perspective, 802.11ah has many advantages for IoT devices that are not found in typical Wi-Fi connections between smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

One advantage is that it uses 900 MHz spectrum instead of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Lower bandwidth will expand and significantly reduce power usage. In addition, 900 MHz can better penetrate walls and other obstacles.

Phifer said: "11ah significantly expands coverage at the cost of throughput to interconnect devices with short pulse data, such as sensor networks ."

The second advantage is that it is easy to deploy and the vendor has built-in support for the same AP of non-IoT devices. Phifer said: "This technology will eventually be widely deployed by vendors ."