Chapter 1 Introducing the NWA

1.3 CAPWAP

The NWA supports Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP). This is ZyXEL’s implementation of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) CAPWAP protocol.

ZyXEL’s CAPWAP allows a single access point to manage up to eight other access points. The managed APs receive all their configuration information from the controller AP. The CAPWAP dataflow is protected by Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS).

The following ZyXEL AP models can be CAPWAP managed APs:

NWA-3160

NWA-3163

NWA-3500

NWA-3550

NWA-3166

The following figure illustrates a CAPWAP wireless network. The user (U) configures the controller AP (C), which then automatically updates the configurations of the managed APs (M1 ~ M4).

Figure 10 CAPWAP Network Example

U

C

 

 

M1

 

M2

M3

M4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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NWA-3500/NWA-3550 User’s Guide