Getting familiar with Wireless LANs

If you have experience working with wired LAN, you won’t find Wireless LAN (WLAN) much different from it, except that WLAN offers unmatched flexibility, mobility, scalability and convenience. WLAN can be easily used to extend your existing wired LAN or to quickly set up a new LAN environment. Computers in a wireless LAN need to be configured to share the same radio channel.

There are two modes of Wireless Network operation:

Ad-hoc mode



In this mode of operation, peer-to-peer (or point-to-point) connectivity is established between two PCs for Internet sharing, file sharing applications etc. Each PC is equipped with the Wireless client Adapter and they can talk to each other without an Access Point.


Infrastructure mode




In this mode of operation, multiple wireless network Adapters can connect to an Access Point to form a complete Wireless network similar to a Wired LAN. Also, in this mode, the Access Point can act as a bridge between the Wireless and Wired LAN.