December 2001
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
8h 42m
English
Before details of the MAC service related protocols are presented, some architectural details of the system pertinent to the MAC layer will be briefly described. From an architectural standpoint, a WLAN can be configured as a basic service set or as an extended service set. Several potentially overlapping WLANs, each of which is a basic service set, constitute an extended service set.
The WLAN in the most generic configuration comprises three entities: the station, the access point (AP), and the wireless medium. A collection of stations that communicate with one another is said to form a Basic Service Set (BSS). A simple BSS typically lacks an AP, and stations in the BSS directly communicate between ...