Wireless N300 Home Router
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Appendix 2 Glossary
Channel
A communication channel, also known as channel, refers either to a physical
transmission medium such as a wire or to a logical connection over a multiplexed
medium such as a radio channel. It is used to transfer an information signal, such
as a digital bit stream, from one or more transmitters to one or more receivers. If
there is only one AP in the range, select any channel you like. The default is
Auto
.
If there are several APs coexisting in the same area, it is advisable that you select
a different channel for each AP to operate on, minimizing the interference between
neighboring APs. For example, if 3 American- standard APs coexist in one area,
you can set their channels respectively to 1, 6 and 11 to avoid mutual interference.
SSID
Service set identifier (SSID) is used to identify a particular 802.11 wireless LAN. It
is the name of a specific wireless network. To let your wireless network adapter
roam among different APs, you must set all APs’ SSID to the same name.
WPA/WPA2
The WPA protocol implements the majority of the IEEE 802.11i standard. It
enhances data encryption through the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP)
which is a 128-bit per-packet key, meaning that it dynamically generates a new
key for each packet. WPA also includes a message integrity check feature to
prevent data packets from being hampered with. Only authorized network users
can access the wireless network. The later WPA2 protocol features compliance
with the full IEEE 802.11i standard and uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
in addition to TKIP encryption protocol to guarantee better security than that
provided by WEP or WPA. Currently, WPA is supported by Windows XP SP1.
IEEE 802.1X Authentication
IEEE 802.1X Authentication is an IEEE Standard for port-based Network Access
Control (PNAC). It is part of the IEEE 802.1 group of networking protocols. It
provides an authentication mechanism to devices wishing to attach to a LAN or
WLAN.IEEE 802.1X defines the encapsulation of EAP over LAN or EAPOL.
802.1X authentication involves three parties: a supplicant, an authenticator, and
an authentication server. The supplicant is a client device (such as a laptop) that
wishes to attach to the LAN/WLAN - though the term 'supplicant' is also used
interchangeably to refer to the software running on the client that provides
credentials to the authenticator. The authenticator is a network device, such as an
Ethernet switch or wireless access point; and the authentication server is typically