Reference Manual for the WG602 v2 54 Mbps Wireless Access Point

IEEE

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This American organization was founded in 1963 and sets standards for computers and communications.

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force. An organization responsible for providing engineering solutions for TCP/ IP networks. In the network management area, this group is responsible for the development of the SNMP protocol.

IKE

Internet Key Exchange. An automated method for exchanging and managing encryption keys between two VPN devices.

Infrastructure Mode

An 802.11 networking framework in which devices communicate with each other by first going through an Access Point (AP). In infrastructure mode, wireless devices can communicate with each other or can communicate with a wired network. When one AP is connected to wired network and a set of wireless stations it is referred to as a Basic Service Set (BSS). An Extended Service Set (ESS) is a set of two or more BSSs that form a single subnetwork. Most corporate wireless LANs operate in infrastructure mode because they require access to the wired LAN in order to use services such as file servers or printers.

Internet Control Message Protocol

ICMP is an extension to the Internet Protocol (IP) that supports packets containing error, control, and informational messages. The PING command, for example, uses ICMP to test an Internet connection.

Internet Protocol

The method or protocol by which data is sent from one computer to another on the Internet. Each computer (known as a host) on the Internet has at least one IP address that uniquely identifies it among all other computers on the Internet. When you send or receive data (for example, an e-mail note or a Web page), the message gets divided into little chunks called packets. Each of these packets contains both the sender's Internet address and the receiver's address. Any packet is sent first to a gateway computer that understands a small part of the Internet. The gateway computer reads the destination address and forwards the packet to an adjacent gateway that in turn reads the destination address and so forth across the Internet until one gateway recognizes the packet as belonging to a computer within its immediate neighborhood or domain. That gateway then forwards the packet directly to the computer whose address is specified.

Because a message is divided into a number of packets, each packet can, if necessary, be sent by a different route across the Internet. Packets can arrive in a different order than they were sent. The Internet Protocol just delivers them. It's up to another protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to put them back in the right order. IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that there is no continuing connection between the end points that are communicating. Each packet that travels through the Internet is treated as an independent unit of data without any relation to any other unit of data. (The reason the packets do get put in the right order is because of TCP, the connection-oriented protocol that keeps track of the packet sequence in a message.) In the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) communication model, IP is in Layer 3, the

Glossary

5

M-10181-03

Page 113
Image 113
NETGEAR WG602 V2 manual Ieee