IEEE 802.11n

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What Does IEEE 802.11n Mean?

IEEE 802.11n is an IEEE 802.11 amendment that modifies the physical and media access control (MAC) layer specifications to increase overall throughput for local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wireless local area networks (WLAN).

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IEEE 802.11n is also known as IEEE 802.11n-2009 or draft n.

Techopedia Explains IEEE 802.11n

The following are the primary IEEE 802.11n objectives:

  • Specifies the technique used to increase maximum throughput for transmitting devices up to 600 Mbps, versus 54 Mbps in the preceding standard
  • Introduces multiple-in/multiple-out (MIMO) technology, frame aggregation at the physical layer and data encoding services

MIMO facilitates the use of multiple source transmitters and receiver node antennae, reduces communication errors and increases data transmission speed, while frame aggregation provisions the simultaneous transmission of multiple frames and reduces communication time.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.