Linksys WMP55AG manual Instant Wireless Series

Instant Wireless® Series

resources of a single processor or server within a small geographic area (for example, within an office building).

MAC Address - The MAC (Media Access Control) address is your computer’s unique hardware number.

Mbps (Megabits per second) - One million bits per second; unit of measure- ment for data transmission.

mIRC - mIRC runs under Windows and provides a graphical interface for log- ging onto IRC servers and listing, joining and leaving channels.

Motherboard - A motherboard is the physical arrangement in a computer that contains the computer's basic circuitry and components.

Network - A system that transmits any combination of voice, video and/or data between users.

Network Mask - also known as the “Subnet Mask.”

NIC (Network Interface Card) - A board installed in a computer system, usu- ally a PC, to provide network communication capabilities to and from that com- puter system. Also called an adapter.

OFDM - Developed for wireless applications, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology offers superior performance-increased data rates and more reliable transmissions-than previous technologies, such as DSSS. OFDM is a scheme in which numerous signals of different frequencies are combined to form a single signal for transmission on the medium.

OFDM works by breaking one high-speed data stream into a number of lower- speed data streams, which are then transmitted in parallel. Each lower speed stream is used to modulate a subcarrier. Essentially, this creates a multi-carrier transmission by dividing a wide frequency band or channel into a number of narrower frequency bands or sub-channels. OFDM is also used for other appli- cations, including powerline networking.

Passphrase - Used much like a password, a passphrase simplifies the WEP encryption process by automatically generating the WEP encryption keys for Linksys products.

Dual-Band Wireless A+G PCI Adapter

PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) - A peripheral bus commonly used in PCs, Macintoshes and workstations. It was designed primarily by Intel and first appeared on PCs in late 1993. PCI provides a high-speed data path between the CPU and peripheral devices (video, disk, network, etc.). There are typically three or four PCI slots on the motherboard. In a Pentium PC, there is generally a mix of PCI and ISA slots or PCI and EISA slots. Early on, the PCI bus was known as a “local bus.”

PCI provides “plug and play” capability, automatically configuring the PCI cards at startup. When PCI is used with the ISA bus, the only thing that is gen- erally required is to indicate in the CMOS memory which IRQs are already in use by ISA cards. PCI takes care of the rest.

PCI allows IRQs to be shared, which helps to solve the problem of limited IRQs available on a PC. For example, if there were only one IRQ left over after ISA devices were given their required IRQs, all PCI devices could share it. In a PCI- only machine, there cannot be insufficient IRQs, as all can be shared.

Plug-and-Play- The ability of a computer system to configure expansion boards and other devices automatically without requiring the user to turn off the system during installation.

Roaming - In an infrastructure mode wireless network, this refers to the abili- ty to move out of one access point's range and into another and transparently reassociate and reauthenticate to the new access point. This reassociation and reauthentication should occur without user intervention and ideally without interruption to network connectivity. A typical scenario would be a location with multiple access points, where users can physically relocate from one area to another and easily maintain connectivity.

Spread Spectrum - Spread Spectrum technology is a wideband radio frequen- cy technique developed by the military for use in reliable, secure, mission-crit- ical communications systems. It is designed to trade off bandwidth efficiency for reliability, integrity, and security. In other words, more bandwidth is con- sumed than in the case of narrowband transmission, but the trade off produces a signal that is, in effect, louder and thus easier to detect, provided that the receiver knows the parameters of the spread-spectrum signal being broadcast. If a receiver is not tuned to the right frequency, a spread-spectrum signal looks like background noise. There are two main alternatives, Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) and Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS).

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