Wi-Fi Direct Products Expected to Have Broad Showing at CES

The Wi-Fi Alliance said it has begun certifying products that can make device-to-device connections as Wi-Fi Certified Wi-Fi Direct. Wi-Fi Direct is expected to appear as a proprietary feature in laptops by year-end, and it will have a heavy presence at the 2011 CES, Sarah Morris, marketing manager for the alliance, told Consumer Electronics Daily. She said Wi-Fi Direct functionality will roll out broadly to consumer electronics products in 2011.

The peer-to-peer networking technology, which enables products to connect wirelessly and without a conventional network, is targeted to portable devices first, Morris said, including mobile handsets, tablets, and notebook computers. TVs and media players will be among the Wi-Fi Direct-certified products in the second wave, she said.

The first products that will be designated Wi-Fi Certified Wi-Fi Direct, and that form the test suite for the certification program, include the Atheros XSPAN Dual-band 802.11n PCIe Mini Card (AR928x), Broadcom BCM43224 Dual-Band 802.11n 2x2 MIMO PCIe Half Mini Card, Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6200, Ralink MIMObility 802.11n 2x2 PCIe Half Mini Card and Realtek RTL8192CE-VA4 HM92C00 PCIe mini card.

According to Morris, semiconductor vendors have been producing proprietary versions of Wi-Fi Direct. “What’s different now is that all these devices can work together regardless of manufacturer or chipset,” she said. After a “good market uptake” with proprietary versions, she said, “they're taking it to it to broader interoperable level that opens it all up."

Features of Wi-Fi Direct include WPA2 encryption offering “government-level security,” Morris said, and advanced discovery features. “A handset can scan the environment and see what other types of Wi-Fi Direct devices are out there and what services they offer,” she said. She described a scenario of a user sending a file from a smartphone to a printer and being able to choose between color and black-and-white output. “There’s a new richness” with the standard that application developers can use “to put a new spin on the user experience,” she said.

Legacy compatibility enables Wi-Fi Direct products to make a basic connection to Wi-Fi devices, but that can’t take advantage of advanced discovery or power savings features, Morris said. If a Wi-Fi Direct laptop is the coordination point for a Wi-Fi Direct group, Morris said, devices will be selected to go off line to save power in a scheduled way that still allows discovery of devices. The Wi-Fi Alliance forecasts 82 million Wi-Fi-enabled portable consumer electronics devices and 216 million Wi-Fi enabled handsets will ship this year, she said, growing at annual rates of 26 percent through 2014 and creating an instant market of compatible products for basic connection. No forecasts were available for Wi-Fi Direct product growth or sales, Morris said.

Wi-Fi Direct enables consumers to connect and operate “anywhere, anytime,” Morris said, saying it’s about syncing data, transferring files and displaying pictures on TV, “not just about an Internet connection.”