What is BSSID?
A six-byte address that distinguishes a particular a particular access point from others. Also know
as just SSID. Serves as a network ID or name.
What is ESSID?
The Extended Service Set ID (ESSID) is the name of the network you want to access. It is used to
identify different wireless networks.
What are potential factors that may causes interference?
Factors of interference:
Obstacles: walls, ceilings, furniture… etc.
Building Materials: metal door, aluminum studs.
Electrical devices: microwaves, monitors and electrical motors.
Solutions to overcome the interferences:
Minimizing the number of walls and ceilings.
Position the WLAN antenna for best reception.
Keep WLAN devices away from other electrical devices, eg: microwaves, monitors, electric
motors, … etc.
Add additional WLAN Access Points if necessary.
What are the Open System and Shared Key authentications?
IEEE 802.11 supports two subtypes of network authentication services: open system and shared
key. Under open system authentication, any wireless station can request authentication. The
station that needs to authenticate with another wireless station sends an authentication
management frame that contains the identity of the sending station. The receiving station then
returns a frame that indicates whether it recognizes the sending station. Under shared key
authentication, each wireless station is assumed to have received a secret shared key over a
secure channel that is independent from the 802.11 wireless network communications channel.
What is WEP?
An optional IEEE 802.11 function that offers frame transmission privacy similar to a wired network.
The Wired Equivalent Privacy generates secret shared encryption keys that both source and
destination stations can use to alert frame bits to avoid disclosure to eavesdroppers.
WEP relies on a secret key that is shared between a mobile station (e.g. a laptop with a wireless
Ethernet card) and an access point (i.e. a base station). The secret key is used to encrypt packets
before they are transmitted, and an integrity check is used to ensure that packets are not modified
in transit.
What is Fragment Threshold?
The proposed protocol uses the frame fragmentation mechanism defined in IEEE 802.11 to
achieve parallel transmissions. A large data frame is fragmented into several fragments each of
size equal to fragment threshold. By tuning the fragment threshold value, we can get varying
fragment sizes. The determination of an efficient fragment threshold is an important issue in this
scheme. If the fragment threshold is small, the overlap part of the master and parallel
transmissions is large. This means the spatial reuse ratio of parallel transmissions is high. In
