WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY

INTRODUCTION
Communication Medium
o
o
o
o

Acoustical
Optical
Mechanical
Electrical

wired
wireless
Wireless versus Mobile
Private versus Public
Types
Wireless
Mobile
Cellular/Personal

Cellular

Mobile
Wireless

DEFINITION

DEFINITION
WPAN WIRELESS PERSONAL AREA NETWORK
NFC Near Field Communication (close proximity, eg: smartphones)
SEMACODE Code scanner
SENSOR wireless sensor
GPS Global Positioning System
RFID Radio Frequency Identification, used to track item in store
M2M Machine 2 Machine using wireless
WLAN WIRELESS LOCAL AREA NETWORK
WIFI Wireless in Fidelity
WWAN WIRELESS WIDE AREA NETWORK

GPRS- General Packet Radio Service (2G)

EDGE - Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution or Enhanced GPRS
3G 3rd Generation Cellular (telephone, mobile internet, video calls etc)
HSPA - High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+ can reach up to 168 Mbps / 22 Mbps)

ADVANTAGES & LIMITATIONS

Advantages

Cost independent of terrain and distance

Suitable for incremental capacity enhancement, i.e. flexible planning

Reduced maintenance effort, i.e. better reliability

Ease of installation and maintenance, i.e. suitability for temporary or emergency services

Dynamic use of medium, i.e trunking capability

Limited mobility

Suitable for multiple operators, i.e. service liberalisation

Limitation

Capacity limited by frequency allocation, i.e. cellular design is expensive

Margin has to be provided for multipath propagation effect, i.e. expensive for normal urban
application

Power source required at terminal end

Wireless LAN
Wireless equivalent of Ethernet
Unlicensed band: ISM Band (2.4 GHz) Industrial, Scientific & Medical
Benefits

: Mobility, Installation speed and simplicity Installation

flexibility, Reduced cost of ownership, Scalability

Base stations (APs): Connect to Ethernet

Laptop Cards: Drivers for Windows, Linux, MacOS
Typical range is up to 300m
Technology
Spread spectrum (wideband) RF
Use more spectrum for better reliability
Frequency Hopping (FH) Spread Spectrum
Direct-Sequence (DS) Spread Spectrum
Standard developed by IEEE and ETSI BRAN
ETSI - European Telecommunications Standards Institute
BRAN Broadband Radio Access Network
IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

IEEE Standard for Wireless LAN

802.11
provides 1 or 2 Mbps transmission in the 2.4 GHz band
using either FH or DS
802.11a
provides up to 54 Mbps in the 5GHz band
50 ft range
802.11b
provides 11 Mbps transmission (with a fallback to 5.5, 2
and 1 Mbps) in the 2.4 GHz band.
uses only DS
150 ft range
802.11g
provides 54 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band.
50 ft range
802.11n
provides 300+ Mbps in the 2.4/5 GHz band.

175 ft range
Use MIMO technology

WIRELESS LAN PERFORMANCE

The performance depends on several factors:

Distance between WLAN devices (AP and NICs/PC)

Transmission power levels typical 30mW
Building and home materials

Radio frequency interference

Signal propagation
Antenna type and location

WIRELESS LAN PERFORMANCE

WIRELESS CHANNEL FREQUENCY

WIRELESS LAN SECURITY

WLAN are open to attacks. The following known attacks are
known to be effective:
Passive Attacks
1 Dictionary based attacks
2 Cracking the WEP key
Active attacks
1 Authentication Spoofing
2 Message Injection
3 Message Modification
4 Message Decryption

WIRELESS LAN SECURITY

To make the WLANs reliable the following security goals were
considered:
Limited access to a WLAN set time based access control at the AP for
each workstation
Authentication Part of IEEE 802.11 protocol
Encryption Part of IEEE 802.11 protocol
Traffic filtering advance configuration set at the AP to filter type of
traffic that flows through
AUTHENTICATION
802.11 specify two authentication mechanisms:
1) Open system authentication
2) Shared key authentication

WIRELESS LAN SECURITY

Open system authentication
A client needs an SSID for successful Association. Any new
client that comes in an area is provided with an SSID. This is equivalent to no
security.

Shared system authentication

The client cannot authenticate himself if he doesn't have the WEP (Wired
Equivalent Protocol) shared secret key. WEP protocol is used for encryption.

WIRELESS LAN SECURITY

Other higher level authentication used are:
AES

- Advanced Encryption Standard

- Key Length of 128, 192, 256 bit
- AES is considered to be un-crackable by most Cryptographers

TKIP

- Temporal Key Integrity Protocol

- Initially referred to as WEP2, is an interim solution that fixes the
key reuse problem of WEP

EAP

- Extensible Authentication Protocol

- provides port-based access control and mutual authentication
between clients and access points via an authentication server
- use of digital certificates

WIRELESS LAN Service Set Identifier (SSID)

SSID is something that you should configure when setting up a wireless
access point
SSID is a label that distinguishes one wireless LAN from another
Typically contains up to 32 alphanumeric characters, which are case
sensitive
Wireless client must have the same SSID as the one put in the access point.
Default SSID Issues : Access points are preconfigured with a default name
for the SSID based on the vendor. E.g Cisco use tsunami

PREPARING WLAN SETUP

Pre-requisite
Physical
Access Point
Client (PC with wireless / Laptop)
Internal cabling
Configuration
SSID
Authentication
Security / firewall
Filtering

PREPARING WLAN SETUP

INTEGRATED WIRELESS ACCESS POINT

Network
Controller
(as well as radius/AAA)

AAA Authentication, Authorization, Accounting

TROUBLESHOOTING IN WIRELESS ENVIRONMENT

Troubleshooting is to determine:
Connectivity between wireless client & AP
Check the SSID setting at the wireless client, is it match with
SSID of the AP?
Check the authentication protocol used, is it WEP, AES, TKIP etc
ipconfig to check own ip address & the gateway
ping to check reachability to the gateway from wireless client
Connectivity to internet
DNS lookup to check on the DNS server reachability
ipconfig /all to check on DNS setting
Slow access to internet
ping to check on latency from wireless client to AP and to
internet server
Traceroute to identify which portion in the network that
cause the slowness
Check on the AP processing capability, is it capable to handle all
protocols (PPP, routing, NAT etc)