Glossary

Terms we use throughout the wiki you should become familiar with

Contents

Glossary
BSS
IBSS
STA
SSID
Information Element
MLME
FullMAC
SoftMAC
WE
CLI
iw

BSS

BSS stands for Basic Service Set. The coverage of an access point is called a BSS.

IBSS

IBSS stands for Independent Basic Service Set. Its basically Ad-Hoc mode. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Basic_Service_Set

STA

STA indicates a wireless device acting in in BSS as a regular STAtion.

SSID

SSID stands for Service Set IDentifier. The SSID is a code attached to all packets on a wireless network to identify each packet as part of that network. The code consists of a string of 1-32 octets (usually represented as case sensitive alphanumeric characters).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSID

Information Element

An Information Element (IE) is a part of management frames in the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN protocol. IEs are a device's way to transfer descriptive information about itself inside management frames. There are usually several IEs inside each such frame, and each is built of Type-length-value (TLVs) mostly defined outside the basic 802.11 specification.

The common structure of an IE is as follows:

 ← 1 →  ← 1 →   ←       4       →   ←  1-251  →
------------------------------------------------
|Type  |Length|        OUI        |     Data   |
------------------------------------------------

MLME

MLME Stands for Media Access Control (MAC) Sublayer Management Entity. MLME is the management entity where the Physical layer (PHY) MAC state machines reside. Examples of states a MLME may assist in reaching:

Authenticate
Deauthenticate
Associate
Disassociate
Reassociate
Beacon
Probe

mac80211's MLME management implementation is currently handled by net/mac80211/ieee80211_sta.c. This handles only the STA MLME

FullMAC

FullMAC is a term used to describe a type of wireless card where the MLME is managed in hardware. You would not use mac80211 to write a FullMAC wireless driver.

SoftMAC

SoftMAC is a term used to describe a type of wireless card where the MLME is expected to be managed in software. mac80211 is a driver API for SoftMAC wireless cards, for example.

WE

WE stands for Wireless-Extensions - the old driver API and user <–> kernel communication transport.

CLI

CLI stands for Command Line Interface. These are utilities you can run in the console or terminal emulator.

iw

iw is a new nl80211 based CLI configuration utility for wireless devices.