CIS505 week 2 Assignment 1 Standards Research Standards Research Stephen C Wilburth Jr
January 16, 2015
Matthew Anyanwu
Strayer University

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual (Working Groups, 2010). The IETF is supervised by the Internet Society Internet Architecture Board (IAB). IETF members are drawn from the Internet Society's individual and organization membership. Standards are expressed in the form of Requests for Comments (RFCs).The mission of the IETF is to make the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet (Working Groups, 2010).
According to IETF website, the actual technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups, which are organized by topic into several areas (e.g., routing, transport, security, etc.). in other words, the IETF is organized into a large number of working groups and informal discussion groups; each dealing with a specific topic. Each group is intended to complete work on that topic and then disband. Each working group has an appointed chairperson, along with a charter that describes its focus and what and when it is expected to produce. The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter. Current areas include: Applications, General, Internet, Operations and Management, Real-time Applications and Infrastructure, Routing, Security, and Transport. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF. The groups will normally be closed once the work described in its charter is finished. In some cases, the WG will instead have its charter updated to take on new tasks as appropriate.
IEEE 802 is an IEEE standard which focuses on local area networks and metropolitan area networks. IEEE 802 helps industry provide advantages such as, interoperability, low product cost, and easy to manage standards (Herald, 2006). More specifically, the IEEE 802 standards are restricted to networks carrying variable-size packets. The number 802 was simply the next free number IEEE could assign, though “802”.The services and protocols specified in IEEE 802 map to the lower two layers (Data Link and Physical) of the seven-layer OSI networking reference model. In fact, IEEE 802 splits the OSI Data Link Layer into two sub-layers named Logical Link Control (LLC) and Media Access Control (MAC). The IEEE 802 family of standards is maintained by the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee (LMSC). The most widely used standards are for the Ethernet family, Token Ring, Wireless LAN, Bridging and Virtual Bridged LANs. An individual Working Group provides the focus for each area (Herald, 2006).
The IEEE 802 Standard comprises a family of networking standards that cover the physical layer specifications of technologies from Ethernet to wireless. IEEE 802 is subdivided into 22 parts that cover the physical and data-link aspects of networking (Trulove, 2006). The better known specifications include 802.3 Ethernet, 802.11 Wi-Fi, 802.15 Bluetooth/ZigBee, and 802.16.All the 802.11 specifications use the Ethernet protocol and Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) for path sharing. The original modulation used in 802.11 was phase-shift keying (PSK). However, other schemes, such as complementary code keying (CCK), are used in some of the newer specifications. The newer modulation methods provide higher data speed and reduced vulnerability to interference (Trulove, 2006)