NWA100 Access Point
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Appendix 1 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.
WEP
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) - A data privacy mechanism based on a 64-bit or 128-bit or 152-bit shared key
algorithm, as described in the IEEE 802.11 standard.
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 is provided by WEP
or WPA.
