WLAN,Wi-Fi on a microcontroller/microprocessor level

Hi,
(Hope this is the right Forum for this. Love this huge community!)

I'm a hobbyist with a lot of persistence . A few month back i was interested in Video Streaming over WLAN and a few days back (I also do small Arduino Projects) I stumbled over the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield.
While i don't thing a Aduino is able to stream a digital Video(480p,720p,1080p) in Real-time, it caught my eye.
My main point of interest in WLAN was getting a above average connectivity and range in the ISM Band (mainly 2.4& 5.8Ghz) not using any Output Power Amplification.
Putting Antennas aside I think what's left to tinker about with is the Modulation and the Channels (switching them [DSSS,FHSS etc.]).
With those specs the cheapest way to get started with WLAN is probably with Wi-Fi (802.11b/g or better jet 802.11n).
So i looked in the datasheet of the HDG104 used with the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield and found:
Modulation: QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM DBPSK, DQPSK, CCK, OFDM with BPSK
And i thought awesome!!, let's have a look at the Library.
Idk if i checked everything but i couldn't find any code about setting the modulation or the channels. That's probably because in a normal use the Wi-Fi chip does those thing on its own. But there should be a possibility to set them manually.
So I was looking for the registers to use with the chip but in the Library I only found a in my view rather small enum in the wifi_spi.h and literally nothing in the datasheet.
The fact that there is nothing in the datasheet leads me to the assumption that the registers must be highly standardized which would make sense.
But because there are "so many" standards and the chips have to be backwards compatible it is all the more confusing to me.
To me it feels like "they" don't want you to get started. ^^
What i found after that were Broadcom Chipset specs which showed some registers (but not well documented) and some of those nice ~3000 pages IEEE-SA papers with which I'm not done skimming through. :smiley:

What is the best way to get started with Wi-Fi on a microcontroller/microprocessor level?

  • Equipment (which Hardware?) [I got a Port207V Cortex-M3 STM32F207VCT6 Development Board (Could that aid me in any way? -Probably still to wimpy-)]
  • Knowledge (what do i have to read up on and where do i get useful information, especially for the modulation and channel part?)

I would google it all by myself but it seems like I'm not good at thinking up keywords to look for anymore.
What's left to say is that any sort of related hint is appreciated! Even just a keyword I might not have used jet would be nice!

regards
Halo