Field Guide to Wireless LANs for Administrators and Power Users, A

IEEE LAN Standards

The job of developing LAN standards, which are occupants of the Data Link layer, was assumed by the IEEE Project 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee (LMSC), which has developed a number of LAN standards, including those based on bus topologies and ring topologies. Two examples of the former are “Ethernet” (known as CSMA/CD^[13] ) and “Token Bus,” products of the IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.4 WGs, respectively. Wireless LANs based on standards defined by the IEEE 802.11 WG don't have a “topology” in the same physical sense as a wired LAN, but logically could be considered a bus. Actually, Token Bus is a hybrid technology, since although it is physically a bus, it is logically a ring. Examples of pure ring topologies include Token Ring, ...