CISCO-DOT11-RADIO-DIAGNOSTIC-MIB

This MIB is intended to be implemented on all 802.11 based Access Points and Wireless Bridges that need to participate in radio environment diagnosis. The devices mentioned above may house any one of the 802.11a/802.11b/802.11g standard- based radio interfaces in them for data communication in the form of radio waves. The administrator, through the NMS, temporarily alters the power and channel configurations of an 802.11 radio interface and the transmits power levels of the associated clients, if any, by setting appropriate values to the objects of this MIB to perform activities like discovering neighboring APs, measuring strength of the signals as received from other APs, studying RF interference levels at various APs, characterizing APs' coverage etc. These changes to the radio interface and the clients' configuration through this MIB are temporary and won't be retained across reloads. GLOSSARY Access Point ( AP ) An entity that contains an 802.11 medium access control ( MAC ) and physical layer ( PHY ) interface and provides access to the distribution services via the wireless medium for associated clients. Wireless Bridge An 802.11 entity that provides wireless connectivity between two wired LAN segments and is used in point- to-point or point-multipoint configurations. Mobile Node ( MN ) A roaming 802.11 wireless device in a wireless network associated with an access point. Repeater-AP A repeater is a 'wireless AP' that is attached to a parent AP on an 802.11 primary port. The Ethernet port is disabled in a Repeater-AP. Radio Diagnosis This process includes continuously monitoring the radio environment to discover new 802.11 stations, measure signal strengths, adapt robustly to interferers and provide a visualization of the radio topology to the administrator. Association The process by which an 802.11 client identifies and gets connected to its parent AP through which it gets the uplink to the wired network. Note that the association happens at the MAC level and the AP holds the MAC addresses of all the clients for whom the AP provides uplink to the wired network. A client, at any point of time, can remain associated only with one AP. Channel An instance of medium use for the purpose of passing protocol data units (PDUs) that may be used simultaneously, in the same volume of space, with other instances of medium use (on other channels) by other instances of the same physical layer (PHY), with an acceptably low frame error ratio due to mutual interference. Some PHYs provide only one channel, whereas others provide multiple channels. Beacons Beacons are short frames that are sent from Access Point to stations or station-to-station in order to organize and synchronize the wireless communication on the Wireless LAN. Beacons serve to achieve time synchronization among clients, exchange SSID information, exchange information about data rates supported by the 802.11 devices etc., Site Survey Site survey is done to discover the RF behavior, coverage and interference to decide the placement of WLAN infrastructure devices like Access Points and Wireless bridges to ensure that all the clients experience continually strong RF signal strength as they roam. 802.11a This is a high speed physical layer extension to the 802.11 standard on the 5 GHz band. Interfaces compliant to 802.11a support data rates upto 54Mbps and operate at 5.15-5.25, 5.25-5.35 and 5.725-5.825 GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) bands as regulated in the United States by the code of Federal Regulations, Title 47, Section 15.407. The radio uses the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as the modulation scheme that enables higher speeds at 54Mbps. 802.11b The 802.11b standard operates at 2.4GHz and is backward compatible with 802.11. An 802.11b system operates at 5.5 and 11 Mbps in addition to the 1 and 2 Mbps datarates specified by the 802.11 standard. 802.11b uses a modulation technique known as Complementary Code Keying (CCK) which allows the higher data speeds. 802.11g This is the most recently approved standard. This standard specifies an operational frequency of 2.4GHz and datarates upto 54Mbps. 802.11g systems are backward compatible with 802.11b systems because of the same operational frequencies. Like 802.11a, 802.11g uses the OFDM modulation scheme to achieve higher speeds.