ABSTRACT
Wireless telephony and cellular systems are an important part of our daily lives and wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies become more and more the primary way to access business and personal data. Two important benefits of wireless technology are a key to the success: the need for cabling is greatly reduced and computers as well as users can be truly mobile. This chapter presents important general considerations and problems of wireless industrial communications and wireless fieldbus systems. It discusses some basic aspects of wireless LAN technology and wireless wave propagation. The chapter also presents the transmission impairments resulting from certain wave propagation effects and some physical layer approaches to deal with them. It also discusses wireless wave propagation has also some interesting consequences on the operation of the medium access control and data-link layer. The chapter describes the important aspects of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard with respect to transmission of real-time data.
