The Child Prodigies of IEEE 802.11 Family

Abstract: WiFi was designed just to replace the wired connections, but it has changed the Internet as a whole. WiFi users are increasing day by day and the traffic from wireless devices is dominating the Internet. With an increasing number of users and their expectations on QoS(Quality of Service) and data rates, there is a need for better WiFi techniques which can support the above-mentioned challenges. The IEEE LAN/MAN standards committee (LMSC) has launched new protocols like IEEE 802.11ac, 802.11ad, and 802.11ax. Understanding them is very important to use them efficiently and effectively to fulfill our expectations. In this paper, we summarize few of the works which talk about the above the mentioned protocol standards of WiFi that brought a significant improvement in WiFi's performance. Moreover we discuss the differences in the protocols and their applications. We also try to compare these three protocols with respect to their supported data rates, range of transmission and Robustness.