Alleviating airport WiFi congestion: An comparison of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi usage and capabilities

Author

Hays, Zachary ; Richter, Grant ; Berger, Stephen ; Baylis, Charles ; Marks, Robert J.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Baylor Univ., Waco, TX, USA

fYear

2014

fDate

3-4 April 2014

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

A study of airport WiFi band usage and wireless device capabilities reveals that the 5 GHz WiFi bands are significantly underused, compared to the 2.4 GHz band. After uncovering this data trend in studies of airport channel usage, a search of newly manufactured wireless devices showed that many new devices do not possess the capability to operate in the 5 GHz bands. Furthermore, the UNII bands allocated for dynamic frequency selection in the 5 GHz WiFi band are barely used, and a vast majority of recently granted devices do not possess the capability to operate in this band. The data suggests that transition of technology to utilize the 5 GHz bands is likely to reduce the present congestion in the 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical band, in turn improving notable metrics of wireless communication, such as download time and packet loss in transmission.

Keywords

airports; bandwidth allocation; wireless LAN; UNII bands; airport WiFi band usage; airport channel usage; band allocation; dynamic frequency selection; frequency 2.4 GHz; frequency 5 GHz; Airports; Bandwidth; Dual band; FCC; IEEE 802.11 Standards; Portable computers; Wireless communication;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Wireless and Microwave Circuits and Systems (WMCS), 2014 Texas Symposium on

Conference_Location

Waco, TX

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WMCaS.2014.7015885

Filename

7015885