The impact of wireless technologies on our lives is nowhere more visible than in their application in the consumer products we rely on daily. From smartphones, internet TVs, media players, and hi-fi systems, through smart appliances and to wearables such as smart watches and intelligent garments, wireless connectivity plays a key role in enabling seamless information exchange. This in turn drives new use cases, bringing cost savings and increased convenience to our everyday lives.

Wireless distribution of images, audio, and video is a central application in the consumer space. However this process has particular “quality of service requirements” that demand informed performance/cost trade-offs in the connectivity subsystem. At the other end of the spectrum wearable applications use limited bandwidth, but have stringent power consumption requirements that require careful technology selection and optimisation of implementations. Across applications, interoperability is critical. Consumer products are being deployed into a high-volume market in which they must play well with solutions from many different vendors.

Integrated connectivity allows form-factor-constrained consumer devices to provide rich virtual user interfaces via the ubiquitous smartphone or tablet. Furthermore, consumer applications have firm cost and resource constraints that demand connectivity solutions built for volume production. Technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Thread, and WiGig are key enablers for wireless connectivity in the consumer space, and each fulfil a particular role in the connected consumer ecosystem.