IEEE 802.11 Short Tutorial

IEEE 802.11 Short TutorialA Short Tutorial on Wireless LANs and IEEE 802.11Daniel L. Lough, T. Keith Blankenship, Kevin J. KrizmanThe Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityBlacksburg, Virginia 24061-0111dlough@vt.edu, blanken@vt.edu, kkrizman@vt.edu1. IntroductionOver recent years, the market for wireless communications has enjoyed tremendous growth. Wireless technology now reaches or is capable of reaching virtually every location on the face of the earth. Hundreds of millions of people exchange information every day using pagers, cellular telephones, and other wireless communication products. With tremendous success of wireless telephony and messaging services, it is hardly surprising that wireless communication is beginning to be applied to the realm of personal and business computing. No longer bound by the harnesses of wired networks, people will be able to access and share information on a global scale nearly anywhere they venture. This article will try to answer some basic questions of why and where wireless local area networks can be used, and present a brief description of some protocols that have been developed, with emphasis on IEEE 802.11.2. Some MotivationSince the success of the Ethernet project at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970's [1] and other similar digital protocols, the basic technology has been in place for local area networks (LANs) to ...