[Gllug] Wireless networking

[Richard Cohen]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, John Southern wrote:

> > In your situation, if just want to use two cards to connect 2 PCs, ad-hoc
> > is probably what you want anyway. Just grab a pair of PCMCIA cards and a
> > PCMCIA/PCI card for your PC and you're off.
>
> Probably a stupid question, but -
> What is the advantage of a base station compared to just using the
> PCMCIA cards?

Wireless networks run in one of two modes, managed and ad-hoc.  With an
ad-hoc network, you have 2 or more cards with no AP (access point, aka base
station), and they fight between themselves for time on the air.  Very easy
to use, but has a power, latency and/or distance overhead.  Managed mode is
what you get with an AP - the AP manages the network, assigning timeslots,
(potentially) doing authentication, and so on - this is more efficient,
since cards only need to be on in their own timeslot, and I think it can
give more distance, but you need an AP, which isn't necessarily cheap.

I have the best of both worlds :-)  An AP is usually just a PCMCIA card in a
box, with, effectively, some custom firmware for the card on a small board.
I have a PrismII chipset card in my 'server' at home, and there are Linux
drivers for this chipset which let it run as an AP - effectively running the
AP firmware in software.  Works fine, apart from the fact that it doesn't
like my cards connecting to it in power saving mode...

Hey!  I got a CF wireless card delivered this morning.  I decided PCMCIA was
just *too big* for me :-)  Works fine in the iPAQ...

Cheers
Richard



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