ZyXEL Communications HES-309M, User Manual, Page: 54 / 246

Chapter 6 WiMAX
HES-309M Series User’s Guide
54
Certificate File Formats
The certification authority certificate that you want to import has to be in one of
these file formats:
• Binary X.509: This is an ITU-T recommendation that defines the formats for
X.509 certificates.
• PEM (Base-64) encoded X.509: This Privacy Enhanced Mail format uses
lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numerals to convert a binary X.509
certificate into a printable form.
• Binary PKCS#7: This is a standard that defines the general syntax for data
(including digital signatures) that may be encrypted. The WiMAX Device
currently allows the importation of a PKS#7 file that contains a single
certificate.
• PEM (Base-64) encoded PKCS#7: This Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) format uses
64 ASCII characters to convert a binary PKCS#7 certificate into a printable
form.
CINR
Carrier to Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (CINR) measures the effectiveness of a
wireless signal and plays an important role in allowing the WiMAX Device to
decode signal burts. If a burst has a high signal strength and a high interference-
plus-noise ratio, it can use Digital Signal Processing (DSP) to decode it; if the
signal strength is lower, it can switch to an alternate burst profile.
RSSI
Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measures the relative strength of a
given wireless signal. This is important in determining if a signal is below the
Clear-To-Send (CTS) threshold. If it is below the arbitrarily specified threshold,
then WiMAX Device is free to transmit any data packets.
EAP Authentication
EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) is an authentication protocol that runs on
top of the IEEE 802.1x transport mechanism in order to support multiple types of
user authentication. By using EAP to interact with an EAP-compatible RADIUS
server, an access point helps a wireless station and a RADIUS server perform
authentication.
The WiMAX Device supports EAP-TLS and EAP-TTLS (at the time of writing, TTLS is
not available in Windows Vista) . For EAP-TLS authentication type, you must first
have a wired connection to the network and obtain the certificate(s) from a
certificate authority (CA). Certificates (also called digital IDs) can be used to
authenticate users and a CA issues certificates and guarantees the identity of each
certificate owner.