Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part II: Making Plans
• WPA/WPA2 Enterprise: This business-oriented variant of WPA
provides the ability to use a special 802.1x or RADIUS server
(explained in Chapter 9) to manage users on the network. For
the vast majority of wireless home networkers, this capability is
overkill, but it doesn’t hurt to have it (any WPA/WPA2 Enterprise
certified system also supports WPA/WPA2 Personal).
� Other certifications: The Wi-Fi Alliance provides a number of other specialized
certifications that not all Wi-Fi certified gear will have earned,
like the following:
• WMM: Wi-Fi Multimedia certification can be found on a growing
number of audio/video and voice Wi-Fi equipment (these items
are discussed in Chapters 12 and 13, respectively). WMM certified
equipment can provide on your wireless LAN some Quality of
Service (QoS), which can give your voice, video, or audio data
priority over other data being sent across your network. We talk
about WMM where appropriate in Chapters 12 and 13.
• WPS: Wi-Fi Protected Setup certification is increasingly common on
new equipment, but still rather new as we write this. WPS, which
we discuss in detail in Chapter 9, is a user-friendly front end to
WPA2 Personal, and allows you to set up network security simply
by pushing buttons (or entering preassigned PIN codes) on your
AP/router and network clients.
• EAP: Extensible Authentication Protocol is part of the WPA
Enterprise/802.1x system used in business wireless LANs — EAP
provides the mechanism for authenticating users (or confirming
that they are who they say they are). A number of different EAP
types can be used with WPA Enterprise — each type can be certified
by the Wi-Fi Alliance. You don’t need to worry about this
unless you’re building a WPA Enterprise security system for your
network.
The underlying IEEE standard for 802.11n (see Chapter 2 for more on this) is
still in draft format — it won’t be ratified until as late as 2009. Most of the
items still up in the air in the final standard relate not to the core networking
functionality of the 802.11n standard, but rather to some specialized aspects
of 802.11n (such as how it will work in new generations of home entertainment
devices). So the manufacturers and the Wi-Fi Alliance itself (which is
made up of manufacturers of Wi-Fi gear) have reached a point where they’re
confident that 802.11n gear sold today is ready to go and they’ve been certifying
equipment since early 2007. What this means to you is that even though it
says draft on the certification, you shouldn’t have anxiety about buying this
gear. For more details on choosing 802.11n equipment, read the sidebar titled
“What to look for in 802.11n gear.”