Laying the foundation – IEEE 802.11
At the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a working group was set up to create specifications for wireless local area networks (WLANs). This slowly evolved into a family of specifications known as the IEEE 802.11 specifications for wireless LANs.
The Ethernet protocol forms the foundation of all the 802.11 specifications.
As investigators who are getting ready to explore the forensics of wireless networks, it is important to develop an understanding of the underlying technology. The 802.11 specifications allow us to gain an insight into data speeds, spectrums, encoding, and so on.
These standards are downloadable and available free of charge from the IEEE website at http://standards.ieee.org/about/get/802/802.11.html.
In a nutshell, the 802.11 specifications are a set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifications that govern communications in wireless LANs in the 2.4, 3.6. 6, and 60 GHz frequency bands...
