IEEE 802.11 Handbook A Designer's Companion [Paperback]

The first generation 802.11 wireless market, once struggling to expand, has spread from largely vertical applications such as healthcare, point of sale, and inventory management to become much more broad as a general networking technology being deployed in offices, schools, hotel guest rooms, airport departure areas, airplane cabins, entertainment venues, coffee shops, restaurants, and homes. This has led to the tremendous growth of new sources of IEEE 802.11 devices. IEEE 802.11 equipment is now moving into its second stage, where the wireless LAN is being treated as a large wireless communication system. As a system, there is more to consider than simply the communication over the air between a single access point and the associated mobile devices. This has lead to innovative changes in the equipment that makes up a wireless LAN. The IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A Designer’s Companion, Second Edition is for the system network architects, hardware engineers and software engineers at the heart of this second stage in the evolution of 802.11 wireless LANs and for those designers that will take 802.11 to the next stage.

Introduction xxv

Acronyms and abbreviations xxxi

Chapter 1 Similarities and differences between wireless and wired local area networks (LANs) 1

Similarities between WLANs and wired LANs 1

Differences between WLANs and wired LANs 1

Chapter 2 IEEE 802.11: First international standard for WLANs 5

IEEE 802.11 architecture 5

STA 6

Basic service set (BSS) 6

Extended service set (ESS) 8

Distribution system (DS) 9

Services 10

STA services 10

Distribution services 11

Interaction between some services 12

Summary 15&l�