Appendix 1 Glossary - Tenda WH450A User Manual

Access Point

Appendix 1 Glossary

Channel
A communication channel, also known as channel, refers either to a physical transmission medium such
as a wire or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel. It is used to
transfer an information signal, such as a digital bit stream, from one or more transmitters to one or more
receivers. If there is only one AP in the range, select any channel you like. The default is Auto.
If there are several APs coexisting in the same area, it is advisable that you select a different channel for
each AP to operate on, minimizing the interference between neighboring APs. For example, if 3
American- standard APs coexist in one area, you can set their channels respectively to 1, 6 and 11 to
avoid mutual interference.
SSID
Service set identifier (SSID) is used to identify a particular 802.11 wireless LAN. It is the name of a
specific wireless network. To let your wireless network adapter roam among different APs, you must set
all APs' SSID to the same name.
WEP
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) - A data privacy mechanism based on a 64-bit or 128-bit or 152-bit
shared key algorithm, as described in the IEEE 802.11 standard.
WPA/WPA2
The WPA protocol implements the majority of the IEEE 802.11i standard. It enhances data encryption
through the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) which is a 128-bit per-packet key, meaning that it
dynamically generates a new key for each packet. WPA also includes a message integrity check feature
to prevent data packets from being hampered with. Only authorized network users can access the
wireless network. The later WPA2 protocol features compliance with the full IEEE 802.11i standard and
uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in addition to TKIP encryption protocol to guarantee better
security than that provided by WEP or WPA. Currently, WPA is supported by Windows XP SP1.
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