Wake-on-LAN
mechanism to wake up computers via a network
Wake-on-LAN (WoL) is an Ethernet or Token Ring computer networking standard that allows a computer to be turned on or awakened from sleep mode by a network message.
The message is usually sent to the target computer by a program executed on a device connected to the same local area network (LAN). It is also possible to initiate the message from another network by using subnet directed broadcasts or a WoL gateway service. It is based upon AMD's Magic Packet Technology, which was co-developed by AMD and Hewlett-Packard, following its proposal as a standard in 1995. The standard saw quick adoption thereafter through IBM, Intel and others.
If the computer being awakened is communicating via Wi-Fi, a supplementary standard called Wake on Wireless LAN (WoWLAN) must be employed.
The WoL and WoWLAN standards are often supplemented by vendors to provide protocol-transparent on-demand services, for example in the Apple Bonjour wake-on-demand (Sleep Proxy) feature.
History
The basis for the Wake-on-LAN industry standard mechanism today was created around 1994 by AMD in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard, who co-developed AMD's Magic Packet Technology and brought forth their following proposal for it in November 1995 in an AMD white paper. It enabled a remote network device to be woken up through the underlying “power management circuitry”, by sending it a standard Ethernet frame, which “contains a specific data pattern detected by the Ethernet-controller on the receiving end”.
AMD implemented the WoL mechanism in their AMD PCnet II-Family of Ethernet controllers before.
“Wake-on-LAN” enters the record as mechanism to wake up computers via a network. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wake-on-LAN, mechanism and wake can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q630380. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995 and 1994.
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