A comparison of wi-fi and wimax with case studies - Florida State ...

CHAPTER ONE
1. Introduction
The cellphone company Nokia uses the slogan of “connecting people” in its advertising
campaign. That means that technologies should be based on demand and humility. In the field of
the Internet, the basis of all research and innovation is geared towards making transmission of
communication more efficient. The network technology that would eventually evolve into “the
Internet” was initially developed by the military requisition called ARPANET, during late 1960s.
ARPA is the acronym for Advanced Research Projects Agency an agency of the Department of
Defense. This network was the pioneer of the “packet switch” type network. Little did the
originators of ARPANET realize that this network would eventually lead to a method that could
connect every PC in the world for sharing and exchanging information. The two most significant
features of ARPANET were the concept of network routing and the use of packet for data
transfer. In ARPANET, each computer was a node and it received the data and then routed it to
next node. ARPANET was also the first network using packet switching to transmit data. Each
node could send each packet to its destination by different paths, so it could improve the
transmission to become more efficient and more reliable. In the beginning, this project only
included four locations, Stanford Research institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and Utah
University. After it was initiated successfully in 1969, the locations extended to the east coast the
following year including MIT, Harvard, Beranek and Newman. This was the world’s first WAN
(Wide Area Network).
In 1973, the Xerox Corporation, located in California, developed the LAN (Local Area
Network) for connecting PCs within a local area. Therefore, the Ethernet was formed. The DIX
alliance (DEC, Intel and Xerox) was the first pusher of Ethernet and then transferred the patent
right to IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers). This move made Ethernet
become popular very quickly. In 1982, DIX published Ethernet Version 2 (EV2) and later on
IEEE published IEEE 802.3 CDMA/CD standard which was based on EV2 in 1983. Today, the
IEEE 802.3 series is the most well-known Ethernet standard. The IEEE 802.3 is a big family that
is presented in table 1-1[67][86]. They can support speeds from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. The
increased technology causes the Internet to continually speed up.
Communication technology continues to develop and an increasing number of
communication technologies have been implemented. However these technologies may not be
compatible with each other. The ARPANET researchers developed a set of protocols called
TCP/IP (Transmission Control protocol/Internet Protocol) to integrate networks that may be
based on differing communications technologies and protocols. Internet research was not only
conducted in U.S., but also in other places such as Europe, Asia, Canada and so on. Competing
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