The Wi-Fi Alliance continues to expand its remit, and the breadth of the ecosystem around its core standards. It has set up a new taskgroup which looks beyond connectivity and seeks to kickstart an applications base around the Wi-Fi Direct technology.
The aim is to create a multivendor interoperable platform for apps which will leverage the peer-to-peer standard and be interoperable with one another. This will be backwards compatible with current Wi-Fi Direct devices and should be completed some time next year.
“Our members have embraced Wi-Fi Direct as an important solution to connect devices directly, which creates an opportunity now to do more,” said Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Alliance.
The latest standard in the expanding Wi-Fi family supports peer-to-peer communications without the need for a hotspot or access point. This brings ad hoc connectivity, similar to that in Bluetooth, to WLans and allows for communications and file transfer on the fly. The Alliance has been running a certification program since late 2010 and has approved over 1,100 products, including chips, TVs, handsets, printers, PCs and tablets.
Wi-Fi has had an ad hoc mode before, but this has been weak compared to Bluetooth’s, and never included in the main, certifiable Wi-Fi standard. Like most true ad hoc technologies, it had flaws in security and throughput. With the new system, one-button linking and WPA2 security are part of the standard.