Chapter 6
Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)
In the mid-1990s, the first Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) devices appeared on the market, but they did not get a lot of consumer attention. This changed rapidly at the beginning of this decade, when the hardware became affordable and WLAN quickly became the standard technology to interconnect computers wirelessly with each other and the Internet. This chapter takes a closer look at this system, which was standardized by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in the 802.11 specification [1]. The first part of this chapter describes the fundamentals of the technology. Apart from wireless Internet access at home and in public hotspots, topics like roaming and wireless bridging are also discussed. Once the system became popular, a number of inherent security flaws were discovered. The chapter therefore also focuses on these issues and shows how WLAN can be used securely. WLAN and UMTS are often compared because they have many things in common. However, there are many differences as well. Therefore, the two systems are compared at the end of the chapter to show which applications are best suited for each.
