Wi-Fi’s next frontier: Connecting devices

Wi-Fi has had an undeniably big year. The wireless technology has made its way into consumers’ homes for IPTV delivery, up 10,000 feet in the air in-flight, into the enterprise for fixed/mobile convergence handset voice connections and onto hundreds upon thousands of hotspots and new devices. Now, the Wi-Fi Alliance, fresh off of making the “N” in 802.11n official, is already looking toward another new and growing Wi-Fi opportunity that even takes humans out of the equation.

Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director for the Wi-Fi Alliance, said the organization is launching a certification program for device-to-device connectivity via Wi-Fi that will officially kick off next summer. Similar to Bluetooth 3.0, which also operates over 802.11 technologies for hide-capacity transfers, device-to-device Wi-Fi enables quick connections between devices. This could include transferring content from a TV set-top box to its display or a proprietary implementation that lets two gamers share a video game between their Wi-Fi-enabled PlayStation consoles. It would also enable wirelessly sharing pictures from a cell phone or even sending a mobile image to display on a projector or a document from a laptop to a printer. Another use case comes from human interface devices, including mice, headphones and displays. Enterprise functionality is also being built in, Davis-Felner said.

The functionality doesn’t require an access point either, she added. While similar to Bluetooth, she said the range and performance of Wi-Fi make it better suited to enable this kind of connectivity that is quick, task-oriented and terminated as soon as the connection is finished.

Davis-Felner said it only takes one device with the new capability to make it work, meaning that thousands of existing products are already eligible for device-to-device connectivity. It’s a pretty significant proposition and one that is altogether pretty simple. The possibilities have the Wi-Fi Alliance excited enough to write its own specification rather than wait for its governing body, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, to propose a standard.

There are, of course, some potential issues with relying on Wi-Fi to connect devices. Interference from multiple non-static devices connecting to one another and finding reliable security protocol measures to govern these ad hoc networks are two, but these are concerns the Wi-Fi Alliance will explore before it begins certifying devices next summer. Device-to-device connectivity is developing as an interesting ancillary market to machine-to-machine communication, a market that has most wireless carriers excited, as well. It will be interesting to see the two initiatives unfold and the devices — smarter and more connected than ever before — that result from them. 

E-mail me at sarah.reedy@penton.com.