3.3 | Wireless Media | |||
3.3.3 | How wireless LANs communicate |
After establishing connectivity to the
WLAN, a node will pass frames in the same manner as on any other 802.x network. WLANs
do not use a standard 802.3 frame. Therefore, using the term wireless
Ethernet is misleading. There are three types of frames: control,
management, and data.
Only the
data frame type is similar to 802.3 frames. The payload of wireless and
802.3 frames is 1500 bytes; however, an Ether frame may not exceed 1518
bytes whereas a wireless frame could be as large as 2346 bytes. Usually
the WLAN frame size will be limited to 1518 bytes as it is most commonly
connected to a wired Ethernet network.
Since radio frequency (RF) is a shared medium, collisions can occur just as they do on wired shared medium. The major difference is that there is no method by which the source node is able to detect that a collision occurred. For that reason WLANs use Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). This is somewhat like Ethernet CSMA/CD. When a source node sends a frame, the receiving node returns a positive acknowledgment (ACK). This can cause consumption of 50% of the available bandwidth. This overhead when combined with the collision avoidance protocol overhead reduces the actual data throughput to a maximum of 5.0 to 5.5 Mbps on an 802.11b wireless LAN rated at 11 Mbps. Performance of the network will also be affected by signal strength and degradation in signal quality due to distance or interference. As the signal becomes weaker, Adaptive Rate Selection (ARS) may be invoked. The transmitting unit will drop the data rate from 11 Mbps to 5.5 Mbps, from 5.5 Mbps to 2 Mbps or 2 Mbps to 1 Mbps.
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