PART 3:

5.4: WIRELESS LAN

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5.4 WIRELESS LAN(802.11)

Wireless LANs offer the following productivity, convenience, and

cost advantages over traditional wired networks:

Mobility: Wireless LAN systems can provide LAN users with
access to real-time information anywhere in their organization.

Installation Speed and Simplicity: Installing a wireless LAN
system can be fast and easy and can eliminate the need to pull cable
through walls and ceilings.

Installation Flexibility: Wireless technology allows the network to
go where wire cannot go.

Scalability: Wireless LAN systems can be configured in a variety
of topologies to meet the needs of specific applications and
installations.

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Components of 802.11 LAN

Four major physical components:

Distribution
system Wireless
medium

Access
point Station

Stations: Networks are built to transfer data between stations.

Stations are computing devices with wireless network interfaces
(typically battery-operated laptop or handheld computers)

Access points (base stations): Frames on an 802.11network must be
converted to another type of frame for delivery to the rest of the
world. Devices called access points perform the wireless-to-wired
bridging function .
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wireless medium: To move frames from station to station, the
standard uses a wireless medium (Initially, two radio frequency (RF)
physical layers and one infrared
physical layer were standardized).

Distribution: When several access points are connected to form a
large coverage area, they must communicate with each other to track
the movements of mobile stations. The distribution system is the
logical component of 802.11 used to forward frames to their
destination. In most commercial products, the distribution system is
the backbone network (mostly Ethernet) used to relay frames
between access points.

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Access Method

The 802.11 MAC layer provides functionality to allow reliable data

delivery for the upper layers over the wireless media.

The data delivery itself is based on an asynchronous, best-effort,
connectionless delivery of MAC layer data. There is no guarantee that
the frames will be delivered successfully.

The 802.11 MAC protocol is quite different from that of Ethernet due
to the inherent complexity of the wireless environment compared to
that of a wired system.

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No CSMA/CD

Wireless LAN cannot implement CSMA/CD for three reasons:

Collision detection implies that the station must be able to send
data and receive collision signals at the same time. This implies
costly stations and increased bandwidth requirements.

The distance between stations in wireless LANs can be great.
Signal fading could prevent a station at one end from hearing a
collision on the other end.

Collision may not be detected because of hidden terminal
problem. This does not happen in wired LAN because all
stations are connected by wire and any collision is heard by all
stations.

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Hidden stations problem:

Since not all stations are within radio range of each other,
transmissions going on in one part of a cell may not be received
elsewhere in the same cell.

Eg., station C is transmitting to station B. if A senses the
channel, it will not hear and falsely conclude that it may now
start transmitting to B

A B C

i. A & C want to transmit to B

ii. C starts transmitting, A cannot hear (out of range )
iii. A then transmits, intefere with C
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Exposed stations problem:

This is an inverse problem.

Eg., station C want to send to D so it listens to the channel. When it
hears a transmission, it falsely concludes that it may not send to C
even though it does not interfere with the transmission from B to A

A B C D

i. B transmits to A, while C wants to transmit to D

ii. C senses that the channel is busy, and doesn 't transmit

Given these difficulties with detecting collision at a wireless receiver, an

access protocol that aimed to avoid collision was developed rather than
detect and recover from collision.
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CSMA/CA

This procedure avoids collisions instead of detecting them.

The sender uses one of the persistence strategies.

After it finds the line idle, the station waits an IFG, interframe gap
(DIFS – distributed interframe space)

It then waits another random amount of time.

After that, it send the frame and sets a timer.

The sender waits for an acknowledgement from the receiver.

If the receiver has correctly and completely received a frame, it
waits for another IFG (short interframe space, SIFS), and then
sends an explicit acknowledgement to the sender.

If the sender receives the acknowledgement before the timer
expires, the transmission is successful.

If the station does not receive an acknowledgement, it knows that
an error has occurred (the frame or acknowledgement is lost ).

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It increments the value of the backoff parameter, waits for a backoff amount
of time, and re-senses the medium
Source Destination Others
DIFS

Note:
The data frame contains a
Data duration field which
indicate the Network

NAV: defer access

allocation vector,NAV
which indicate the time
which others should defer
SIFS

ACK

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11
 RTS

A B C

A requests to send The 802.11 protocol can

CTS CTS also use a short Request
to Send(RTS) and Clear
A B C
to Send (CTS) control
frame to reserve access
B notifies A that it is OK to send
to the channel.
Data

A B C

A sends data frame C remains silent

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Before sending a frame, the source station senses the medium by
using a persistence strategy with backoff until the channel is idle.

If the medium is idle, the station waits for a DIFS before it sends
RTS.

After receiving the RTS, the destination station waits for a SIFS
before sending CTS (indicating that it is ready to receive data).

After receiving the CTS, the source station waits for another SIFS
before sending the data frame.

If the data frame is completely and correctly received, the
destination station sends back an acknowledgement after another
SIFS.

Acknowledgement is needed as the source station does not have any
means to check for successful arrival of its data at the destination (In
CSMA/CD, the lack of collision implies that the data have arrived
safely).

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 Source Destination Others
DIFS

RTS

SIFS

CTS

NAV: defer access

SIFS

Data

SIFS

ACK

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Note: NAV is set in both RTS and CTS
Types of Networks

The basic building block of an 802.11 network is the basic service set
(BSS), which is simply a group of stations that communicate with
each other

Communications take place within an area known as the basic
service area

BSSs come in two flavors:
i. Ad hoc network
ii. Infrastructure network

Station Station Station Station

Access
point

Station Station
Station Station

Ad hoc network (BSS without AP) Infrastructure network (BSS with an AP)

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Ad Hoc Network: Stations in an independent BSS communicate
directly with each other and thus must be within direct communication
range. The smallest possible 802.11 network is a network with two
stations. Typically, ad hoc network are composed of a small number of
stations set up for a specific purpose and for a short period of time
(short-lived network to support a single meeting in a conference
room). They are sometimes referred to as ad hoc BSSs or independent
BSS

Infrastructure BSS: They are distinguished by the use of access
points. Access points are used for all communications in infrastructure
networks, including communication between mobile nodes in the same
service area. If one mobile station in an infrastructure BSS needs to
communicate with a second mobile station, the communication must
take two hops. Stations must associate with an access point to obtain
network services (logically equivalent to plugging in network cable in
Ethernet )

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Extended Service Set (ESS): 802.11 allows wireless networks of
arbitrarily large size to be created by linking BSSs into an extended
service set. An ESS is created by chaining BSSs together with a
backbone network. All the access points in an ESS are given the same
service set identifier (SSID), which serves as a network “name” for the
users
Distribution system

Server or gateway

Access Access Access

point point point
BSS BSS BSS

Station Station Station Station

Station Station Station

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MAC Frame Format

Frame formats are specified for wireless LAN systems by 802.11.

Each frame consists of a MAC header, a frame body and a frame
check sequence (FCS).

The MAC header consists of seven fields and is 30 bytes long. The
fields are frame control, duration, address 1, address 2, address 3,
sequence control, and address 4.

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The frame control field is 2 bytes long and is comprised of 11 subfields.

o The protocol version field carry the version of the 802.11 standard.
o Type and subtype fields work together hierarchically to determine
the function of the frame.
o The “To DS” and “From DS” bits indicate that frame is going to or
coming from the intercell distribution system
o The MF bit means more fragments will follow.
o The Retry bit marks a retransmission of a frame sent earlier.

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 o The Power management bit is used by the base station to put
the receiver into sleep state or take it out of sleep state.
o The more bit indicates that the sender has additional frames for
the receiver.
o The W bit specifies that the frame body has been encrypted
using the WEP(Wired Equivalent Privacy) algorithm.
o If the O bit is on, the receiver must process the frame strictly in
order.

Duration/ID field (2 bytes long).
o For data frames, it indicates the time (ms) the channel will be
allocated for successful transmission
o For control frames, it contains an association, or connection
identifier

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The address fields identify the basic service set, the destination
address, the source address, and the receiver and transmitter
addresses. Each address field is 6 bytes long.

The sequence control field is 2 bytes and is split into 2 subfields:
Fragment number (4 bits) - tells how many fragments the MSDU
is broken into.

Sequence number (12 bits) - indicates the sequence number of the
MSDU.

The frame body (between 0 and 2312 bytes) contains information
based on the type and subtype defined in the FC field

The FCS (4 bytes) contains CRC-32 error detection sequence.

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