Networking

March 18th was the student open day of the IEEE 802 plenary session held in Beijing. I was invited by MSRA to attend. The participants in the standard-setting process are all professionals, and I was basically like Granny Liu visiting the Grand View Garden, just there for the amusement. Since photography and recording were prohibited at the venue, and the technical documents discussed at the meeting were not public, there are no pictures or solid evidence to share.

First, let me explain what IEEE 802 is. IEEE 802 is a committee under IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), responsible for the establishment of local area network and metropolitan area network standards. The physical layer and link layer protocols of computer networks are basically established by this organization. IEEE 802 holds three plenary sessions each year, most of which are held in North America. Voting rights are granted from the third participation in the plenary session.

IEEE 802 has several working groups, for example, 802.3 is responsible for Ethernet, which is the wired network we use; 802.11 is responsible for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), commonly known as wifi. Each working group still has a lot to do. For example, Ethernet has 100M, 1G, 10G, 40G, 100G, and the 400G under research. Not only are the speeds different, but the transmission media used are also different; WLAN has 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad standards, not only are the speeds different, but the frequency bands used are also different. Therefore, each working group has Task Forces and Study Groups.