Wireless LAN Concepts

Wireless LAN technology is becoming increasingly popular for a wide variety of applications. After evaluating the technology, most users are convinced of its reliability, satisfied with its performance and are ready to use it for large-scale and complex wireless networks. Originally designed for indoor office applications, today's Wireless LANs can be used for both indoor peer-to-peer networks as well as for outdoor point-to-point and point-to-multipoint remote bridging applications. Wireless LANs can be designed to be modular and very flexible. They can also be optimized for different environments. For example, point-to-point outdoor links are less susceptible to interference and can have higher performance if designers increase the " dwell time " and disable the " collision avoidance " and " fragmentation " mechanisms described later in this section. Traditional LANs (Local Area Networks) link PCs and other computers to one another and to file servers, printers and other network equipment using cables or optic fibers as the transmission medium.