User manual NETGEAR WG602 V3 REFERENCE MANUAL

[. . . ] Reference Manual for the NETGEAR 54 Mbps Wireless Access Point WG602v3 NETGEAR, Inc. 4500 Great America Parkway Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA Phone 1-888-NETGEAR 202-10060-02 February 2005 202-10060-02, February 2005 NETGEAR, INC. Technical Support Please register to obtain technical support. To register your product, get product support or obtain product information and product documentation, go to www. netgear. com. If you do not have access to the World Wide Web, you can register your product by filling out the registration card and mailing it to NETGEAR customer service. [. . . ] IEEE 802. 11b/g wireless nodes communicate with each other using radio frequency signals in the ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) band between 2. 4 GHz and 2. 5 GHz. However, due to spread spectrum effect of the signals, a node sending signals using a particular channel will utilize frequency spectrum 12. 5 MHz above and below the center channel frequency. As a result, two separate wireless networks using neighboring channels (for example, channel 1 and channel 2) in the same general vicinity will interfere with each other. Applying two channels that allow the maximum channel separation will decrease the amount of channel cross-talk, and provide a noticeable performance increase over networks with minimal channel separation. The radio frequency channels used in 802. 11b/g networks are listed in Table B-2: Table B-2: Channel 1 2 3 802. 11b/g Radio Frequency Channels Center Frequency 2412 MHz 2417 MHz 2422 MHz Frequency Spread 2399. 5 MHz - 2424. 5 MHz 2404. 5 MHz - 2429. 5 MHz 2409. 5 MHz - 2434. 5 MHz Wireless Networking Basics 202-10060-02, February 2005 B-7 Reference Manual for the NETGEAR 54 Mbps Wireless Access Point WG602v3 Table B-2: Channel 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 802. 11b/g Radio Frequency Channels Center Frequency 2427 MHz 2432 MHz 2437 MHz 2442 MHz 2447 MHz 2452 MHz 2457 MHz 2462 MHz 2467 MHz 2472 MHz Frequency Spread 2414. 5 MHz - 2439. 5 MHz 2419. 5 MHz - 2444. 5 MHz 2424. 5 MHz - 2449. 5 MHz 2429. 5 MHz - 2454. 5 MHz 2434. 5 MHz - 2459. 5 MHz 2439. 5 MHz - 2464. 5 MHz 2444. 5 MHz - 2469. 5 MHz 2449. 5 MHz - 2474. 5 MHz 2454. 5 MHz - 2479. 5 MHz 2459. 5 MHz - 2484. 5 MHz Note: The available channels supported by the wireless products in various countries are different. and Canada, and Channels 1 to 13 are supported in Europe and Australia. The preferred channel separation between the channels in neighboring wireless networks is 25 MHz (5 channels). This means that you can apply up to three different channels within your wireless network. It is recommended that you start using channel 1 and grow to use channel 6, and 11 when necessary, as these three channels do not overlap. WPA and WPA2 Wireless Security Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) is a specification of standards-based, interoperable security enhancements that increase the level of data protection and access control for existing and future wireless LAN systems. The IEEE introduced the WEP as an optional security measure to secure 802. 11b (Wi-Fi) WLANs, but inherent weaknesses in the standard soon became obvious. In response to this situation, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new security architecture in October 2002 that remedies the shortcomings of WEP. This standard, formerly known as Safe Secure Network (SSN), is designed to work with existing 802. 11 products and offers forward compatibility with 802. 11i, the new wireless security architecture that has been defined by the IEEE. B-8 202-10060-02, February 2005 Wireless Networking Basics Reference Manual for the NETGEAR 54 Mbps Wireless Access Point WG602v3 WPA and WPA2 offer the following benefits: · · · · Enhanced data privacy Robust key management Data origin authentication Data integrity protection The Wi-Fi Alliance is now performing interoperability certification testing on Wi-Fi Protected Access products. Starting August of 2003, all new Wi-Fi certified products have to support WPA. NETGEAR is implementing WPA and WPA2 on client and access point products. The 802. 11i standard was ratified in 2004. How Does WPA Compare to WEP? WEP is a data encryption method and is not intended as a user authentication mechanism. WPA user authentication is implemented using 802. 1x and the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). With 802. 11 WEP, all access points and client wireless adapters on a particular wireless LAN must use the same encryption key. A major problem with the 802. 11 standard is that the keys are cumbersome to change. If you do not update the WEP keys often, an unauthorized person with a sniffing tool can monitor your network for less than a day and decode the encrypted messages. Products based on the 802. 11 standard alone offer system administrators no effective method to update the keys. For WPA, encryption using Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) is required. TKIP replaces WEP with a new encryption algorithm that is stronger than the WEP algorithm, but that uses the calculation facilities present on existing wireless devices to perform encryption operations. TKIP provides important data encryption enhancements including a per-packet key mixing function, a message integrity check (MIC) named Michael, an extended initialization vector (IV) with sequencing rules, and a re-keying mechanism. [. . . ] But, using TKIP, WPA-PSK automatically changes the keys at a preset time interval, making it much more difficult for hackers to find and exploit them. The Wi-Fi Alliance will call this, 'WPA-Personal. ' Wi-Fi Protected Access and IEEE 802. 11i Comparison Wi-Fi Protected Access will be forward-compatible with the IEEE 802. 11i security specification currently under development by the IEEE. Wi-Fi Protected Access is a subset of the current 802. 11i draft, taking certain pieces of the 802. 11i draft that are ready to bring to market today, such as its implementation of 802. 1x and TKIP. These features can also be enabled on most existing Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products as a software upgrade. [. . . ]