Lucent Technologies Inc, Aironet Corp, and Digital Ocean Inc have announced plans to develop an IEEE 802.11- compliant protocol that defines how access points from different vendors communicate with each other to support mobile stations roaming across cells on a wireless local network. Called the Inter-Access Point Protocol specification, it is to be made freely available to other vendors, and the manufacturers concerned hope it will evolve into a de facto industry standard. The group says that this specification is the missing element of 802.11. Unlike the new Wireless LAN Interoperability Forum, the new group says that there is no question of its work diverging from the forthcoming 802.11 standard. It sees its specification as complementary to the IEEE’s work, since the 802.11 committee was only ever charged with developing specifications for the Physical and Media Access Control layers of the Open Systems Interconnection reference model, and the Inter-Access Point Protocol is designed to deal with higher-level layers such as logical link control. Members of the group say that they have already been in touch with other manufacturers, and that they are hoping to announce more supporters in the near future.
