Cisco® Network Professional's: Advanced Internetworking Guide

19.6. Wireless Implementation Strategies

In the past few years the strategy for implementing wireless devices has changed quite a bit. In the past, you simply had APs and those APs connected to switches and the rest of the wired network. No other devices were required to make them function. A new breed of wireless devices has been released, though, and they are typically referred to as the lightweight architecture. Lightweight APs now have an additional required device in order to operate on the network; this device is called the Wireless LAN Controller (WLC). The old APs are now called autonomous APs; they are called autonomous because they don't require any other device to operate and a new name was needed for comparison's sake. I'll take ...