WiFi operates in the unlicensed ISM spectrum; it is trivial to deploy by anyone, anywhere; and

the required hardware is simple and cheap. Not surprisingly, it has become one of the most
widely deployed and popular wireless standards.

The name itself is a trademark of the WiFi Alliance, which is a trade association established to
promote wireless LAN technologies, as well as to provide interoperability standards and testing.
Technically, a device must be submitted to and certified by the WiFi Alliance to carry the WiFi
name and logo, but in practice, the name is used to refer to any product based on the IEEE
802.11 standards.

The first 802.11 protocol was drafted in 1997, more or less as a direct adaptation of the Ethernet
standard (IEEE 802.3) to the world of wireless communication. However, it wasnt until 1999,
when the 802.11b standard was introduced, that the market for WiFi devices took off. The
relative simplicity of the technology, easy deployment, convenience, and the fact that it operated
in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band allowed anyone to easily provide a "wireless extension" to
their existing local area network. Today, most every new desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, and
just about every other form-factor device is WiFi enabled.

From Ethernet to a Wireless LAN

The 802.11 wireless standards were primarily designed as an adaptation and an extension of the
existing Ethernet (802.3) standard. Hence, while Ethernet is commonly referred to as the LAN
standard, the 802.11 family (Figure 6-1) is correspondingly commonly known as the wireless
LAN (WLAN). However, for the history geeks, technically much of the Ethernet protocol was
inspired by the ALOHAnet protocol, which was the first public demonstration of a wireless
network developed in 1971 at the University of Hawaii. In other words, we have come full circle.

Figure 6-1. 802.3 (Ethernet) and 802.11 (WiFi) data and physical layers

The reason why this distinction is important is due to the mechanics of how the ALOHAnet, and
consequently Ethernet and WiFi protocols, schedule all communication. Namely, they all treat
the shared medium, regardless of whether it is a wire or the radio waves, as a "random access
channel," which means that there is no central process, or scheduler, that controls who or which
device is allowed to transmit data at any point in time. Instead, each device decides on its own,
and all devices must work together to guarantee good shared channel performance.

The Ethernet standard has historically relied on a probabilistic carrier sense multiple access
(CSMA) protocol, which is a complicated name for a simple "listen before you speak" algorithm.
In brief, if you have data to send:

Check whether anyone else is transmitting.

If the channel is busy, listen until it is free.

 When the channel is free, transmit data immediately.

Of course, it takes time to propagate any signal; hence collisions can still occur. For this reason,
the Ethernet standard also added collision detection (CSMA/CD): if a collision is detected, then
both parties stop transmitting immediately and sleep for a random interval (with exponential
backoff). This way, multiple competing senders wont synchronize and restart their transmissions
simultaneously.

WiFi follows a very similar but slightly different model: due to hardware limitations of the radio,
it cannot detect collisions while sending data. Hence, WiFi relies on collision avoidance
(CSMA/CA), where each sender attempts to avoid collisions by transmitting only when the
channel is sensed to be idle, and then sends its full message frame in its entirety. Once the WiFi
frame is sent, the sender waits for an explicit acknowledgment from the receiver before
proceeding with the next transmission.

There are a few more details, but in a nutshell thats all there is to it: the combination of these
techniques is how both Ethernet and WiFi regulate access to the shared medium. In the case of
Ethernet, the medium is a physical wire, and in the case of WiFi, it is the shared radio channel.

In practice, the probabilistic access model works very well for lightly loaded networks. In fact,
we wont show the math here, but we can prove that to get good channel utilization (minimize
number of collisions), the channel load must be kept below 10%. If the load is kept low, we can
get good throughput without any explicit coordination or scheduling. However, if the load
increases, then the number of collisions will quickly rise, leading to unstable performance of the
entire network.

If you have ever tried to use a highly loaded WiFi network, with many peers competing for
accesssay, at a large public event, like a conference hallthen chances are, you have firsthand
experience with "unstable WiFi performance." Of course, the probabilistic scheduling is not the
only factor, but it certainly plays a role.