AirLive WN-380USB - Manual (Page 40)

5. Appendix
AirLive WN-380USB User’s Manual 36
Transmit / Receive
The wireless throughput in Bytes per second averaged over two seconds.
Wi-Fi Alliance
The Wi-Fi Alliance is a nonprofit international association formed in 1999 to certify
interoperability of wireless Local Area Network products based on IEEE 802.11
specification. The goal of the Wi-Fi Alliance’s members is to enhance the user experience
through product interoperability. The organization is formerly known as WECA.
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)
The Wi-Fi Alliance put together WPA as a data encryption method for 802.11 wireless LANs.
WPA is an industry-supported, pre-standard version of 802.11i utilizing the Temporal Key
Integrity Protocol (TKIP), which fixes the problems of WEP, including using dynamic keys.
Wide Area Network (WAN)
A WAN consists of multiple LANs that are tied together via telephone services and / or fiber
optic cabling. WANs may span a city, a state, a country, or even the world
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP)
Now widely recognized as flawed, WEP was a data encryption method used to protect the
transmission between 802.11 wireless clients and APs. However, it used the same key
among all communicating devices. WEP’s problems are well-known, including an
insufficient key length and no automated method for distributing the keys. WEP can be
easily cracked in a couple of hours with off-the-shelf tools.
Wireless LAN (WLAN)
A wireless LAN does not use cable to transmit signals, but rather uses radio or infrared to
transmit packets through the air. Radio Frequency (RF) and infrared are the commonly
used types of wireless transmission. Most wireless LANs use spread spectrum technology.
It offers limited bandwidth, usually under 11Mbps, and users share the bandwidth with other
devices in the spectrum; however, users can operate a spread spectrum device without
licensing from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Fragment Threshold
The proposed protocol uses the frame fragmentation mechanism defined in IEEE 802.11 to
achieve parallel transmissions. A large data frame is fragmented into several fragments
each of size equal to fragment threshold. By tuning the fragment threshold value, we can
get varying fragment sizes. The determination of an efficient fragment threshold is an
important issue in this scheme. If the fragment threshold is small, the overlap part of the
master and parallel transmissions is large.