Online Computer Terms Dictionary - W

wireless

<networking> A term describing a computer network where there is no physical connection (either copper cable or fibre optics) between sender and receiver, but instead they are connected by radio.

Applications for wireless networks include multi-party teleconferencing, distributed work sessions, personal digital assistants, and electronic newspapers. They include the transmission of voice, video, images, and data, each traffic type with possibly differing bandwidth and quality-of-service requirements. The wireless network components of a complete source-destination path requires consideration of mobility, hand-off, and varying transmission and bandwidth conditions. The wired/wireless network combination provides a severe bandwidth mismatch, as well as vastly different error conditions. The processing capability of fixed vs. mobile terminals may be expected to differ significantly. This then leads to such issues to be addressed in this environment as admission control, capacity assignment and hand-off control in the wireless domain, flow and error control over the complete end-to-end path, dynamic bandwidth control to accommodate bandwidth mismatch and/or varying processing capability.

Usenet newsgroup comp.std.wireless.

(1995-02-27)