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Appendix I: Glossary
Access Point (AP)
: Any entity that has station functionality and provides access to the
distribution services, via the wireless medium (WM) for associated stations.
Channel
: An instance of medium use for the purpose of passing protocol data units (PDUs)
that may be used simultaneously, in the same volume of space, with other instances of
medium use(on other channels) by other instances of the same physical layer (PHY),with an
acceptably low frame error ratio(FER) due to mutual interference.
SSID:
Service Set identifier. An SSID is the network name shared by all devices in a
wireless network. Your network’s SSID should be unique to your network and identical for all
devices within the network. It is case-sensitive and must not exceed 20 characters (use any
of the characters on the keyboard).Make sure this setting is the same for all devices in your
wireless network.
WEP:
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is the method for secure wireless data
transmission. WEP adds data encryption to every single packet transmitted in the wireless
network. The 40bit and 64bit encryption are the same because of out 64 bits, 40 bits are
private. Conversely, 104 and 128 bit are the same. WEP uses a common KEY to encode
the data. Therefore, all devices on a wireless network must use the same key and same
type of encryption. There are 2 methods for entering the KEY; one is to enter a 16-bit HEX
digit. Using this method, users must enter a 10-digit number (for 64-bit) or 26-digit number
(for 128-bit) in the KEY field. Users must select the same key number for all devices. The
other method is to enter a text and let the computer generate the WEP key for
you. However, since each product use different method for key generation, it might not
work for different products. Therefore, it is NOT recommend using.
WPA/WPA2:
A security protocol for wireless networks that builds on the basic foundations
of WEP. It secures wireless data transmission by using a key similar to WEP, but the added
strength of WPA is that the key changes dynamically. The changing key makes it much more
difficult for a hacker to learn the key and gain access to the network.WPA2 is the second
generation of WPA security and provides a stronger encryption mechanism through
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is a requirement for some government users.
