WiMedia is the consumer brand mark for high data-rate, wireless multimedia networking operating in a wireless personal area network (WPAN) with a range of about 10 m. The WiMedia mark will provide a consumer-friendly means for identifying and assuring that products will work together to enable multimedia connectivity. With a focus on ease of use, WiMedia will achieve hundreds of megabits per sec communications in conjunction with high quality-of-service (QoS) provisions. This powerful combination will facilitate environments that can support multiple simultaneous streams of HDTV video, audio, and data. Anticipated WiMedia-enabled devices include MP3 players, digital cameras, printers/scanners, home-theater equipment, and video gaming platforms, to name a few. Initial devices should appear on the market for the 2004 holiday season, with volume shipments increasing in 2005 and 2006.

The force behind the development of WiMedia is The WiMedia Alliance (www.wimedia.org), a not-for-profit open industry association formed in mid-2002. The goal of the Alliance is to develop and adopt standards-based specifications, including application, transport, and control profiles; test suites; and a certification program to accelerate widespread consumer adoption.

Like its wireless counterpart Wi-Fi, which has emerged as a major force both in home networking and retail "hotspots," WiMedia is built upon an IEEE standard. Whereas Wi-Fi is basically a consumer name for IEEE 802.11 (a, b, g, etc.), which was designed as a wireless Ethernet and excels at computer networking, the WiMedia Alliance chose to build upon the IEEE 802.15.3 standard, with a focus on an ultra-wide band (UWB) physical layer (802.15.3a). 802.15.3 is optimized for low-cost, small-form factor and low-power consumer devices, and was specially designed to meet the demanding requirements of portable consumer imaging and multimedia applications. When combined with the extremely high date rate of UWB, the multimedia-oriented features of the 802.15.3 medium access controller provide the QoS provisions needed for streaming HDTV and other multimedia applications.

In addition to the bandwidth and QoS, an important technical characteristic of 802.15.3 and WiMedia is support for ad-hoc (or "spontaneous") networks in which the connected devices are only temporarily part of the network. In the case of mobile or portable devices, they remain part of the network only while in relatively close proximity to the rest of the network. A wireless personal area network can either be built around an object or a person, and can be either stationary or in motion, allowing a significant number of digital devices within range to directly communicate with each other without a central "access point," as needed in a Wi-Fi network. This will provide consumers with a newfound freedom to add a device without complex configuration. Finally, the standard is also secure - implementing privacy, data integrity, mutual-entity authentication, and data-origin authentication for consumer applications.