Linksys Instant Wireless Series User Manual page 22

resources of a single processor or server within a small geographic area (for
example, within an office building).
MAC Address - The MAC (Media Access Control) address is your computer's
unique hardware number.
Mbps (Megabits per second) - One million bits per second; unit of measure-
ment for data transmission.
mIRC - mIRC runs under Windows and provides a graphical interface for log-
ging onto IRC servers and listing, joining and leaving channels.
Motherboard - A motherboard is the physical arrangement in a computer that
contains the computer's basic circuitry and components.
Network - A system that transmits any combination of voice, video and/or data
between users.
Network Mask - also known as the "Subnet Mask."
NIC (Network Interface Card) - A board installed in a computer system, usu-
ally a PC, to provide network communication capabilities to and from that com-
puter system. Also called an adapter.
OFDM - Developed for wireless applications, Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM) technology offers superior performance-increased data
rates and more reliable transmissions-than previous technologies, such as
DSSS. OFDM is a scheme in which numerous signals of different frequencies
are combined to form a single signal for transmission on the medium.
OFDM works by breaking one high-speed data stream into a number of lower-
speed data streams, which are then transmitted in parallel. Each lower speed
stream is used to modulate a subcarrier. Essentially, this creates a multi-carrier
transmission by dividing a wide frequency band or channel into a number of
narrower frequency bands or sub-channels. OFDM is also used for other appli-
cations, including powerline networking.
Passphrase - Used much like a password, a passphrase simplifies the WEP
encryption process by automatically generating the WEP encryption keys for
Linksys products.
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Instant Wireless Series
®
Dual-Band Wireless A+G PCI Adapter
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) - A peripheral bus commonly used
in PCs, Macintoshes and workstations. It was designed primarily by Intel and
first appeared on PCs in late 1993. PCI provides a high-speed data path
between the CPU and peripheral devices (video, disk, network, etc.). There are
typically three or four PCI slots on the motherboard. In a Pentium PC, there is
generally a mix of PCI and ISA slots or PCI and EISA slots. Early on, the PCI
bus was known as a "local bus."
PCI provides "plug and play" capability, automatically configuring the PCI
cards at startup. When PCI is used with the ISA bus, the only thing that is gen-
erally required is to indicate in the CMOS memory which IRQs are already in
use by ISA cards. PCI takes care of the rest.
PCI allows IRQs to be shared, which helps to solve the problem of limited IRQs
available on a PC. For example, if there were only one IRQ left over after ISA
devices were given their required IRQs, all PCI devices could share it. In a PCI-
only machine, there cannot be insufficient IRQs, as all can be shared.
Plug-and-Play - The ability of a computer system to configure expansion
boards and other devices automatically without requiring the user to turn off
the system during installation.
Roaming - In an infrastructure mode wireless network, this refers to the abili-
ty to move out of one access point's range and into another and transparently
reassociate and reauthenticate to the new access point. This reassociation and
reauthentication should occur without user intervention and ideally without
interruption to network connectivity. A typical scenario would be a location
with multiple access points, where users can physically relocate from one area
to another and easily maintain connectivity.
Spread Spectrum - Spread Spectrum technology is a wideband radio frequen-
cy technique developed by the military for use in reliable, secure, mission-crit-
ical communications systems. It is designed to trade off bandwidth efficiency
for reliability, integrity, and security. In other words, more bandwidth is con-
sumed than in the case of narrowband transmission, but the trade off produces
a signal that is, in effect, louder and thus easier to detect, provided that the
receiver knows the parameters of the spread-spectrum signal being broadcast.
If a receiver is not tuned to the right frequency, a spread-spectrum signal looks
like background noise. There are two main alternatives, Direct Sequence
Spread Spectrum (DSSS) and Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS).
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