Wireless Lan Cards example essay topic

351 words
A wireless LAN, as the name implies, is a LAN without any wires to connect different nodes in the network, because in these LAN's wireless media or unguided media is used for this purpose. Most wireless LAN's today work either on Infra-red (IR) or Radio Frequencies (RF). Infra-red devices have a problem of "line of sight", while radio frequencies are more immune to noise etc. Just like any network a wireless LAN also has to follow a standard, some protocol, some handshaking mechanism.

The standards for Wireless LAN's which are most commonly used are 802.11 by I and Hiper LAN (used in europe). Although most wireless LAN cards normally connect directly with your PC and enable you to communicate with other nodes in the network over wireless media, a different approach could be to build a device equipped with a RF-module or simply a FM transmitter / receiver. This device should be able to communicate with the standard Ethernet LAN cards and transmit their data over radio frequencies using the RF-module. If in a Ethernet every node is equipped with such a device, the LAN can be safely termed as a wireless LAN. At the very first look it may seem impossible, but if we consider the fact that in a 802.3 network (Ethernet) the LAN cards don't send any acknowledgments and don't wait for them either, things become pretty simple. Whenever a LAN card gets some data from the upper layers, it simply frames the packet and sends it on the outgoing link, without caring whether the packet will reach its destination or not, this worrying is done by the upper layers (transport layer) and even if the upper layer is sending some ack or nack it will look just like a normal packet to the LAN card.

So all this proves that the LAN card will show no hesitance in sending its data to the wireless device. How the wireless device is going to decode the Manchester encoded data sent by the LAN card is another story altogether.