Nortel and Cisco have used some of their marketing budget for something really useful for engineers, says engineer Martin Sauter, to open up the IEEE standards 802 library for free public access.
These include the famous Ethernet (802.1,2,3), Wifi (802.11) and WiMAX (802.16) standards. Only approved documents are available, so that excludes some documents such as the current 802.11n draft, but it does include the 802.16e (Mobile WiMAX) standard as well as IEEE 802.15 (Wireless Personal Area Networks)
It’s awfully dense and opaque to me. But it’s free to take a look at the actual specs.
Martin also mentions 802.16j, the “Mobile Multihop Relay” (MMR). The basic idea behind MMR is to allow WiMAX base stations which do not have a backhaul connection to communicate with base stations that do. It extends network coverage into areas where connecting a base station directly to the network via a fixed line connection is economically or technically not feasible.
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