ADVANCED NETWORKING

ITNAA2

Chap 19:
Wireless Technology

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Wireless Technology
• Wireless Networks
• Wireless Devices
• Wireless Principles
• Non-overlapping Wi-Fi Channels
• Radio Frequency (RF)
• Wireless Security
Wireless Networks
• Wireless networks come in many forms, cover various distances, and
provide a wide range of bandwidth capacities depending on the type
that’s been installed.
• The typical wireless network today is an extension of an Ethernet
LAN, with wireless hosts utilizing Media Access Control (MAC)
addresses, IP addresses, and so forth, just like they would on a wired
LAN.
• Wireless LANs are an extension of our existing LANs, which covers a
range of distances from short-range personal area networks to wide
area networks (WANs) that really go the distance.
• Today’s wireless networks is represented below:
Wireless Networks
ACTIVITY: During your class you are to divide into groups where you
will conduct research and each group may present their findings.
The following topics should be presented:
• Wireless LAN (WLAN)
• Wireless Metro Area Network (WMAN)
• Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN)
Wireless Devices
• Though it might not seem this way to you right now, simple wireless
networks (WLANs) are less complex than their wired cousins because
they require fewer components.
• To make a basic wireless network work properly, all you need are two
main devices: a wireless AP and a wireless network interface card
(NIC).
• This also makes it a lot easier to install a wireless network, because
basically, you just need an understanding of these two components
in order to make it happen.
Wireless Devices
Wireless Access Points
• You’ll find a central component like a hub or switch in the vast
majority of wired networks, which is there to connect hosts and
allow them to communicate.
• Wireless also have a component that connects all wireless devices
together, only that device is known as a wireless access point (AP).
• Wireless APs have at least one antenna.
• Usually there’s two for better reception (referred to as diversity) and
a port to connect them to a wired network.
Wireless Devices
Wireless Access Points
APs have the following characteristics:
• APs function as a central junction point for the wireless stations
much like a switch or hub does within a wired network.
• Due to the half-duplex nature of wireless networking, the hub
comparison is more accurate, even though hubs are rarely found in
the wired world anymore.
• APs have at least one antenna—most likely two.
• APs function as a bridge to the wired network, giving the wireless
station access to the wired network and/or the Internet.
• SoHo APs come in two flavours—the stand-alone AP and the wireless
router.
• They can and usually do include functions like network address
translation (NAT) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).
Wireless Devices
Wireless Network Interface Card (NIC)
• Every host you want to connect to a wireless network needs a
wireless network interface card (NIC) to do so.
• Basically, a wireless NIC does the same job as a traditional NIC, only
instead of having a socket/port to plug a cable into, the wireless NIC
has a radio antenna.
Wireless Antennas
• Wireless antennas work with both transmitters and receivers. There
are two broad classes of antennas on the market today:
• omni-directional (or point-to-multipoint)
• directional (or point-to- point).
Wireless Principles
Independent Basic Service Set (Ad Hoc)
• This is the easiest way to install wireless 802.11 devices.
• In this mode, the wireless NICs (or other devices) can communicate
directly without the need for an AP.
• A good example of this is two laptops with wireless NICs installed.
• If both cards were set up to operate in ad hoc mode, they could
connect and transfer files as long as the other network settings, like
protocols, were set up to enable this as well.
• We’ll also call this an independent basic service set (IBSS), which is
born as soon as two wireless devices communicate.
Wireless Principles
Independent Basic Service Set (Ad Hoc) Continues:
• To create an ad hoc network, all you need is two or more wireless-
capable devices.
• Once you’ve placed them within a range of 20–40 meters of each other,
they’ll “see” each other and be able to connect— assuming they share
some basic configuration parameters.
• One computer may be able to share the Internet connection with the
rest of them in your group.
• An ad hoc network, also known as peer to peer, doesn’t scale well, and I
wouldn’t recommend it due to collision and organization issues in today’s
corporate networks.
• With the low cost of APs, you don’t need this kind of network anymore
anyway, except for maybe in your home—probably not even there.
• Another con is that ad hoc networks are pretty insecure, so you really
want to have the AdHoc setting turned off before connecting to your
wired network.
Wireless Principles
Basic Service Set (BSS)
• A basic service set (BSS) is the area, or cell, defined by the wireless
signal served by the AP.
• It can also be called a basic service area (BSA), and the two terms,
BSS and BSA, can be interchangeable.
• Even so, BSS is the most common term that’s used to define the cell
area.
• Unlike the ad hoc network, this network will scale better and more
hosts can communicate in this network because the AP manages all
network connections.
Wireless Principles
Infrastructure Basic Service Set
• In infrastructure mode, wireless NICs only communicate with an
access point instead of directly with each other like they do when
they’re in ad hoc mode.
• All communication between hosts, as well as any wired portion of
the network, must go through the access point.
• Remember this important fact: in infrastructure mode, wireless
clients appear to the rest of the network as though they were
standard, wired hosts.
• This connection from the access point to the wired network is called
the distribution system (DS) and is how the APs communicate to each
other about hosts in the BSA.
Wireless Principles
Infrastructure Basic Service Set
• Basic standalone APs don’t communicate with each other via the
wireless network, only through the DS.
• Before you configure a client to operate in wireless infrastructure
mode, you need to understand SSIDs.
• The service set identifier (SSID) is the unique 32-character identifier
that represents a particular wireless network and defines the BSS.
• All devices involved in a particular wireless network can be
configured with the same SSID.
• Sometimes access points even have multiple SSIDs.
Wireless Principles
Service Set ID
• An SSID is a basic name that defines the Basic Service Area (BSA)
transmitted from the AP.
• This is the name the AP transmits out to identify which WLAN the client
station can associate with.
• The SSID can be up to 32 characters long. It normally consists of human-
readable ASCII characters, but the standard doesn’t require this.
• The SSID is defined as a sequence of 1–32 octets, each of which may take
any value.
• The SSID is configured on the AP and can be either broadcasted to the
outside world or hidden.
• If the SSID is broadcasted, when wireless stations use their client
software to scan for wireless networks.
• The network will appear in a list identified by its SSID.
• But if it’s hidden, it either won’t appear in the list at all or will show up as
“unknown network” depending on the client’s operating system.
Wireless Principles
Service Set ID
• Either way, a hidden SSID requires the client station be configured
with a wireless profile, including the SSID, in order to connect.
• This requirement is above and beyond any other normal
authentication steps or security essentials.
• The AP associates a MAC address to this SSID.
• It can be the MAC address for the radio interface itself—called the
basic service set identifier (BSSID)—or it can be derived from the
MAC address of the radio interface if multiple SSIDs are used.
• The latter is sometimes called a virtual MAC address and you would
call it a multiple basic service set identifier (MBSSID).
Wireless Principles
Extended Service Set
• A good to thing to know is that if you set all your access points to the
same SSID, mobile wireless clients can roam around freely within the
same network.
• This is the most common wireless network design you’ll find in today’s
corporate settings.
• Doing this creates something called an extended service set (ESS), which
provides more coverage than a single access point and allows users to
roam from one AP to another without having their host disconnected
from the network.
• This design gives us the ability to move fairly seamlessly from one AP to
another.
• For users to be able to roam throughout the wireless network—from AP
to AP without losing their connection to the network—all APs must
overlap by 20 percent of their signal or more to their neighbour’s cells.
• To make this happen, be sure the channels (frequency) on each AP are
set differently.
Wireless Principles
Repeaters
• If you need to extend the coverage of an AP, you can either increase
the gain of a directional antenna or add another AP into the area.
• If neither of those options solves your problem, try adding a repeater
AP into the network and extending the range without having to pull
an Ethernet cable for a new AP.
• A wireless repeater AP isn’t connected to the wired backbone.
• It uses its antenna to receive the signal from an AP that’s directly
connected to the network and repeats the signal for clients located
too far away from it.
Wireless Principles
Repeaters Continued
• To make this work, you need appropriate overlap between Aps.
• Another way to get this to happen is to place a repeater AP with two
radios in use, with one receiving and the other one transmitting.
• This works somewhat like a dual half-duplex repeater.
• Seems cool, but there’s an ugly downside to this design—for every
repeater installed you lose about half of your throughput!
• Since no one likes less bandwidth, a repeater network should only be
used for low-bandwidth devices, like a barcode reader in a
warehouse.
Wireless Principles
Bridging
• Bridges are used to connect two or more wired LANs, usually located
within separate buildings, to create one big LAN.
• Bridges operate at the MAC address layer (Data Link layer), which means
they have no routing capabilities.
• You’ve got to put a router in place if you want to be able to do any IP
subnetting within your network.
• Basically, you would use bridges to enlarge the broadcast domains on
your network to improve your network’s capacity.
• To build wireless networks correctly, it’s important to have a working
knowledge of root and non-root bridges, sometimes referred to as parent
and child bridges.
• Some bridges allow clients to connect directly to them, but others don’t,
so make sure you understand exactly your business requirements before
just randomly buying a wireless bridge.
Wireless Principles
Bridging
• Root devices are connected to the wired network, which allows non-
root devices, like clients, to access the wired resources through the
root device.
Here are some important guidelines to help you design your wireless
networks:
• Non-root devices can only communicate to root devices.
• Non-root devices include non-root bridges, workgroup bridges,
repeater access points, and wireless clients.
• Root devices cannot communicate to other root devices. Examples of
devices that can be roots are APs and bridges.
• Non-root devices cannot communicate to other non-root devices but
it you have a non-root bridge set up as a repeater AP with two
radios, know that the device must be configured as a non-root
device.
Wireless Principles
Mesh Networks
• As more vendors migrate to a mesh hierarchical design, and as larger
networks are built using lightweight access points that are managed by a
controller, you can see that we need a standardized protocol that governs
how lightweight access points communicate with WLAN systems.
• Mesh networking infrastructure is decentralized and comparably
inexpensive for all the nice amenities it provides because each host only
needs to transmit as far as the next host.
• Hosts act as repeaters to transmit data from nearby hosts to peers that
are too far away for a manageable cabled connection. The result is a
network that can span a large area, especially over rough or difficult
terrain.
• Remember that mesh is a network topology in which devices are
connected with many redundant connections between host nodes, and
we can use this topology to our advantage in large wireless installations.
Wireless Principles
Mesh Networks
• Because each host can potentially be connected to several other
hosts, if one of them drops out of the network because of hardware
failure or something, its neighbours simply find another route,
meaning you get extra capacity and fault tolerance automatically just
by adding more hosts
• Wireless mesh connections between AP hosts are formed with a
radio, providing many possible paths from a single host to other
hosts.
• Paths through the mesh network can change in response to traffic
loads, radio conditions, or traffic prioritization.
Non-overlapping Wi-Fi
Channels
Nonoverlapping Wi-Fi channels
• In both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz frequency band, channels are
defined by the standards.
• 802.11, 802.11b, and 802.11g use the 2.4GHz band also known as
the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band.
• 802.11a uses the 5GHz band. When two access points are operating
in same area on the same channel or even an adjacent channel, they
will interfere with each other.
• Interference lowers the throughput.
• Therefore, channel management to avoid interference is critical to
ensure reliable operation.
Radio Frequency (RF)
Radio Frequency (RF)
• It all starts when an electrical signal like one that represents data from a
LAN needs to be transmitted via radio waves.
• First, the signal is sent to an antenna where it is then radiated in a
pattern that’s determined by the particular type of antenna.
• The pattern radiated from an antenna is an electrical signal called an
alternating current, and the direction of the signal’s current changes
cyclically.
• This cycle creates a pattern known as a waveform.
• The waveform has peaks and valleys that repeat in a pattern, and the
distance between one peak or valley and the next is known as the
wavelength.
• The wavelength determines certain properties of the signal—for
example, the impact of obstacles in the environment.
• Some AM radio stations use wavelengths that stretch well over a
thousand feet, or 400–500 meters, but our wireless networks use a
wavelength that’s smaller than your outstretched hand.
Radio Frequency (RF)
Radio Frequency (RF)
• Because cable, fiber, and other physical media impose various limitations
upon data transmission, the ultimate goal is for us to use radio waves to
send information instead.
• A radio wave can be defined as an electromagnetic field that radiates
from a sender, which hopefully gets to the intended receiver of the
energy that’s been sent.
• A good example of this concept is the electromagnetic energy we call
light that our eyes can interpret and send to our brains, which then
transform it into impressions of colours.
• When traveling through the air, certain wave groups are more efficient
than others depending on the type of information being sent because
they have different properties.
• So, it follows that different terms are used to define different signals
generated in the transmitter when they’re sent to the antenna to create
the movements of the electrons generated within an electric field.
• This process creates an electromagnetic wave, and we use the terms
frequency and wavelength to define them.
Radio Frequency (RF)
Radio Frequency (RF)
• The frequency determines how often a signal is “seen,” with one
frequency cycle called 1 hertz (Hz).
• The size or distance of the cycle pattern is called the wavelength.
• The shorter the wavelength, the more often the signal repeats itself,
and the more often it repeats, the higher its frequency is considered
to be when compared with a wavelength that repeats itself less often
in the same amount of time.
• Lower frequencies can travel farther but provide less bandwidth.
• Higher frequencies have a wavelength with fast repeat times, which
means that although they can’t travel long distances, they can carry
higher bandwidth.
Radio Frequency (RF)
Radio Frequency (RF)
• Amplitude refers to the strength of the signal and is commonly
represented by the Greek symbol α.
• It has a profound effect on signal strength because it represents the
level of energy injected into one cycle.
• The more energy injected in a cycle, the higher the amplitude.
• The term gain is used to describe an increase in the RF signal.
Radio Frequency (RF)
Radio Frequency (RF)
ACTIVITY: During your class, critically evaluate and discuss the
challenges inherent to wireless networking and possible ways to
mitigate factors that negatively affect transmissions, including the
following factors:
• Free Space Path Loss
• Absorption
• Reflection
• Multipath
• Refraction
• Diffraction
• Scattering
Wireless Security
Authentication and Encryption
• Two types of authentication were specified by the IEEE 802.11
committee: open and shared-key authentication.
• Open authentication involves little more than supplying the right
SSID, but it’s the most common method in use today.
• With shared-key authentication, the access point sends the client
device a challenge-text packet that the client must then encrypt with
the correct Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) key and return to the
access point.
• Without the correct key, authentication will fail, and the client won’t
be allowed to associate with the access point.
Wireless Security
Authentication and Encryption
Consider the following process illustrative of shared-key authentication:
Wireless Security
Authentication and Encryption
Consider the following process illustrative of open access authentication:
Wireless Security
WEP
• With open authentication, even if a client can complete
authentication and associate with an access point, the use of WEP
prevents the client from sending and receiving data from an access
point unless the client has the correct WEP key.
• A WEP key is composed of either 40 or 128 bits, and in its basic form,
it’s usually statically defined by the network administrator on the
access point, and on all clients that communicate with that access
point.
• When static WEP keys are used, a network administrator must
perform the tedious task of entering the same keys on every device
in the WLAN.
Wireless Security
WPA and WPA2: An Overview
• Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and WPA2 were created in response to
the shortcomings of WEP.
• WPA was a stopgap measure taken by the Wi-Fi Alliance to provide
better security until the IEEE finalized the 802.11i standard.
• When 802.11i was ratified, WPA2 incorporated its improvements, so
there are some significant differences between WPA and WPA2.
• These are each essentially another form of basic security that are
really just an add-on to the specifications.
• Even though you can totally lock the vault, WPA/WPA2 pre-shared
key (PSK) is a better form of wireless security than any other basic
wireless security method we have covered so far, keeping in mind it
is basic.
• The benefit of WPA keys over static WEP keys is that the WPA keys
can change dynamically while the system is used.
Wireless Security
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA)
• WPA was designed to offer two methods of authentication in
implementation.
• The first, called WPA Personal or WPA (PSK), was designed to work using
a passphrase for authentication, but it improves the level of protection
for authentication and data encryption too.
• WPA PSK uses the exact same encryption as WPA Enterprise—the PSK
just replaces the check to a RADIUS server for the authentication portion.
PSK offers us these benefits:
• The Initialization vector (IV) is 48 bits and not 24 bits.
• The key for each frame is changed for each packet, hence the term
temporal, or temporary.
• Centralized key management by the AP including broadcast and unicast
keys.
• A new form of frame check sequence (FCS) which refers to the part of
any packet that’s used to ensure that the integrity of the packet is
maintained. It’s also used to determine if anything changed in the packet.
Wireless Security
WPA3
• In 2018 the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the new WPA3, a Wi-Fi security
standard to replace WPA2.
• The WPA2 standard has served us well, but it’s been around since
2004!
• WPA3 will improve on the WPA2 protocol with more security
features just like WPA2 was designed to fix WPA.
• Remember that WPA2 uses a PSK, but WPA3 has been upgraded to
128-bit encryption and uses a system called Simultaneous
Authentication of Equals (SAE).
• This is referred to as the Dragonfly handshake which forces network
interaction on a login so that hackers can’t deploy a dictionary attack
by downloading its cryptographic hash and then running cracking
software to break it.
Wireless Security
WPA3
Here’s a list of characteristics shared by all WPA3 networks:
• Use the latest security methods
• Don’t allow outdated legacy protocols
• Require the use of Protected Management Frames (PMF)
Wireless Security
Comparison of WPA, WPA2, and WPA3:
End of Chapter 19.
• Students should go through all material on LMS
prior to classes – this will enhance your learning
journey as you will have fundamental knowledge
to build on during classes.

• Lecturer to complete group discussions in relation

• It is important to complete activities in class using