This MIB is intended to be implemented on all
802.11 based Access Points and Wireless Bridges
that need to participate in radio environment
diagnosis.  The devices mentioned above may house
any one of the 802.11a/802.11b/802.11g standard-
based radio interfaces in them for data
communication in the form of radio waves.  The
administrator, through the NMS, temporarily alters
the power and channel configurations of an 802.11
radio interface and the transmits power levels of
the associated clients, if any, by setting
appropriate values to the objects of this MIB to
perform activities like discovering neighboring APs,
measuring strength of the signals as received from
other APs, studying RF interference levels at
various APs, characterizing APs' coverage etc.
These changes to the radio interface and the clients'
configuration through this MIB are temporary and
won't be retained across reloads.

                   GLOSSARY

Access Point ( AP )

An entity that contains an 802.11 medium access
control ( MAC ) and physical layer ( PHY ) interface
and provides access to the distribution services via
the wireless medium for associated clients.

Wireless Bridge

An 802.11 entity that provides wireless connectivity
between two wired LAN segments and is used in point-
to-point or point-multipoint configurations.

Mobile Node ( MN )

A roaming 802.11 wireless device in a wireless
network associated with an access point.

Repeater-AP

A repeater is a 'wireless AP' that is attached to a
parent AP on an 802.11 primary port.  The Ethernet
port is disabled in a Repeater-AP.

Radio Diagnosis

This process includes continuously monitoring the
radio environment to discover new 802.11 stations,
measure signal strengths, adapt robustly to
interferers and provide a visualization of the radio
topology to the administrator.

Association

The process by which an 802.11 client identifies and
gets connected to its parent AP through which it
gets the uplink to the wired network.  Note that
the association happens at the MAC level and the AP
holds the MAC addresses of all the clients for
whom the AP provides uplink to the wired network.
A client, at any point of time, can remain
associated only with one AP.

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 due to mutual
interference. Some PHYs provide only one channel,
whereas others provide multiple channels.

Beacons

Beacons are short frames that are sent from Access
Point to stations or station-to-station in order to
organize and synchronize the wireless communication
on the Wireless LAN.  Beacons serve to achieve
time synchronization among clients, exchange SSID
information, exchange information about data rates
supported by the 802.11 devices etc.,


Site Survey

Site survey is done to discover the RF behavior,
coverage and interference to decide the placement of
WLAN infrastructure devices like Access Points and
Wireless bridges to ensure that all the clients
experience continually strong RF signal strength as
they roam.

802.11a

This is a high speed physical layer extension to
the 802.11 standard on the 5 GHz band.  Interfaces
compliant to 802.11a support data rates upto 54Mbps
and operate at 5.15-5.25, 5.25-5.35 and 5.725-5.825
GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure
(U-NII) bands as regulated in the United States by
the code of Federal Regulations, Title 47, Section
15.407.  The radio uses the Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as the modulation
scheme that enables higher speeds at 54Mbps.

802.11b

The 802.11b standard operates at 2.4GHz and is
backward compatible with 802.11. An 802.11b
system operates at 5.5 and 11 Mbps in addition to
the 1 and 2 Mbps datarates specified by the 802.11
standard.  802.11b uses a modulation technique known
as Complementary Code Keying (CCK) which allows the
higher data speeds.

802.11g

This is the most recently approved standard.  This
standard specifies an operational frequency of
2.4GHz and datarates upto 54Mbps.  802.11g systems
are backward compatible with 802.11b systems because
of the same operational frequencies.  Like 802.11a,
802.11g uses the OFDM modulation scheme to achieve
higher speeds.