Wireless/Redundant Edge Services xl Module Management and Configuration Guide WS.01.03 or greater

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Introduction
Radio Ports
802.11 management frames include:
■ beacon frames, which the RP uses to announce itself to wireless stations
and which will be discussed in more detail in “Beaconing” on page 1-37
■ authentication frames, which wireless devices use to ensure that they are
connecting to the correct peer
■ association frames, which stations use to negotiate the wireless connec-
tion to an RP
A station cannot send or receive data until it associates to an RP.
At its most fundamental level, an 802.11 network can be defined as a set of
stations that communicates over the same medium. More broadly, an 802.11
network is a set of stations and RPs that share a network name. For the
purposes of understanding how to configure your Wireless Edge Services xl
Module, some important 802.11 concepts are:
■ Basic service set (BSS)
■ Basic service set identifier (BSSID)
■ Extended service set (ESS)
■ Service set identifier (SSID)
BSS
A BSS is the set of wireless stations controlled by a single coordination
function and the RP to which they connect. In other words, the BSS consists
of all stations that share the same medium (the radio signal broadcast by an
RP) to transmit and receive data. (See Figure 1-11.)