Appendix E Wireless LANs
Table 55 Wireless LAN Standards Comparison Table
WIRELESS LAN | MAXIMUM NET | FREQUENCY | COMPATIBILITY | |
STANDARD | DATA RATE | BAND |
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IEEE 802.11a | 54 Mbps | 5 GHz |
| IEEE 802.11n |
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| IEEE 802.11b |
IEEE 802.11n | 300 Mbps | 2.4 GHz, 5 | GHz | IEEE 802.11g |
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| IEEE 802.11a |
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Wireless Security Overview
Wireless security is vital to your network to protect wireless communication between wireless clients, access points and the wired network.
Wireless security methods available on the NWA are data encryption, wireless client authentication, restricting access by device MAC address and hiding the NWA identity.
The following figure shows the relative effectiveness of these wireless security methods available on your NWA.
Table 56 Wireless Security Levels
SECURITY | SECURITY TYPE | |
LEVEL | ||
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Least | Unique SSID (Default) | |
Secure |
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Unique SSID with Hide SSID Enabled | ||
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| MAC Address Filtering | |
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| WEP Encryption | |
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| IEEE802.1x EAP with RADIUS Server Authentication | |
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Most Secure | WPA2 | |
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Note: You must enable the same wireless security settings on the NWA and on all wireless clients that you want to associate with it.
IEEE 802.1x
In June 2001, the IEEE 802.1x standard was designed to extend the features of IEEE 802.11 to support extended authentication as well as providing additional accounting and control features. It is supported by Windows XP and a number of network devices. Some advantages of IEEE 802.1x are:
•User based identification that allows for roaming.
•Support for RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service, RFC 2138, 2139) for centralized user profile and accounting management on a network RADIUS server.
•Support for EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol, RFC 2486) that allows additional authentication methods to be deployed with no changes to the access point or the wireless clients.
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NWA1120 Series User’s Guide | |
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