Wireless networking
Wireless networks utilize a range of 802.11 specifications to provide connectivity over 2.4 or 5 GHz frequency bands at a variety of speeds. The significant differences between wireless frames and those found on wired networks are as follows:
- Wireless networks employ carrier sense (every station is listening), multiple access (shared medium), and collision avoidance (avoiding collisions instead of just recovering from them) techniques, which reduce the throughput
- In addition to data frames, which get forwarded to the wired network, wireless frame types include the following:
- Management frames: This is used for authentication and association tasks
- Control frames: This controls send/receive functions on the shared media to help avoid collisions
Wireshark can be used to capture and analyze packets on Wireless networks. However, in order to analyze the control and management frames, as well as select the radio channels to capture on without having to associate with a specific...
