Advantages/Disadvantages of wifi

One of the most prevalent advantages of WiFi wireless LAN technologies is that it is completely wire-free.

(Wi-Fi Alliance, What) You also must remember that WiFi products are widely distributed, and an easy technology to use.

Disadvantages: Even though WiFi products are useful, there are still some downfalls that must be stated in order to get a firm grasp on exactly what WiFi wireless LAN technologies are composed of.

(WiFi) To counteract this problem, however, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) has been established.

Mobile data offloading

Mobile data offloading, also called data offloading is the use of complementary network technologies for delivering data originally targeted for cellular networks.

For the operators the main purpose for the offloading is congestion of the cellular networks.

The main complementary network technologies used for the mobile data offloading are Wi-Fi, Femtocell and Integrated Mobile Broadcast.

This is due to surge of the mobile data.. Increasing need for offloading solutions is caused by the explosion of the Internet data traffic and especially the growing portion of the traffic going through mobile networks.

In addition, WiMax and terrestrial networks (LAN) are also candidates for offloading of 3G mobile data.


Femtocells use standard cellular radio technologies, and thus any mobile device is capable of participating in the data offloading process, though some modification is needed to accommodate the different backhaul connection .

Wi-Fi technology is different radio technology than cellular, but most Internet capable mobiles devices now come with Wi-Fi capability.

The consolidation of Wi-Fi networks is proceeding both through a community approach, FON as the prime example, and by the consolidation of Wi-Fi network operators .

In the IWLAN architecture, a mobile device opens a VPN/IPsec tunnel from the device to the dedicated IWLAN server in the operator’s core network to provide the user either an access to the operator’s walled-garden services or to a gateway to the public Internet.


Studies show that significant amount of data can be offloaded in this manner to Wi-Fi networks even when users are mobile .

In the remotely managed approach a network server initiates each offloading procedure by prompting the connection manager of a specific user device.

Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF) is the most complete 3GPP approach to date for controlling offloading between 3GPP and non-3GPP access networks (such as Wi-Fi).

Many operating systems provide a connection manager that can automatically switch to WiFi network if the connection manager detects a known Wi-Fi network.

The connection managers do not require coupling of the cellular and the WiFi networks.

Hotspot (Wi-Fi)

A hotspot is a site that offers Internet access over a wireless local area network through the use of a router connected to a link to an Internet service provider.

Public access wireless local area networks (LANs) were first proposed by Henrik Sjödin at the NetWorld+Interop conference in The Moscone Center in San Francisco in August 1993.

Sjödin did not use the term hotspot but referred to publicly accessible wireless LANs.

The original notion was that users would pay for broadband access at hotspots.


For venues that have broadband Internet access, offering wireless access is as simple as purchasing one access point (AP), in conjunction with a router and connecting the AP to the Internet connection.

Many services provide payment services to hotspot providers, for a monthly fee or commission from the end-user income.

ZoneCD is a Linux distribution that provides payment services for hotspots who wish to deploy their own service.

Roaming services are expanding among major hotspot service providers.


With roaming service the users of a commercial provider can have access to other provider's hotspots with extra fees, in which such a user will be usually charged on the basis of access-per-minute.

Roaming agreements can be hard to negotiate with larger providers such a Boingo, so smaller hotspots usually use an aggregator such as www.gowifi.com to access these networks.

A EDCF user priority list shares the traffic in 3 access categories (data, video, audio) and user priorities (UP) (Pommer, p. 117): If the net traffic increases, then the frames of the particular access category (AC) are assigned a low priority value (e.g.

A "poisoned/rogue hotspot" refers to a free public hotspot set up by identity thieves or other malicious individuals for the purpose of "sniffing" the data sent by the user.


In order to provide robust security to hotspot users, WiFi alliance is coming up with a new hotspot program which aims to encrypt hotspot traffic with the latest WPA2 security.

wireless access point (WAP)

A wireless access point (WAP) connects a group of wireless devices to an adjacent wired LAN.

An access point resembles a network hub, relaying data between connected wireless devices in addition to a (usually) single connected wired device, most often an ethernet hub or switch, allowing wireless devices to communicate with other wired devices.

Wireless adapters allow devices to connect to a wireless network.

A wireless router allows wired and wireless ethernet LAN devices to connect to a (usually) single WAN device such as a cable modem or a DSL modem.

A wireless router allows all three devices, mainly the access point and router, to be configured through one central utility.

A bridge differs from an access point: an access point connects wireless devices to a wired network at the data-link layer.

Two wireless bridges may be used to connect two wired networks over a wireless link, useful in situations where a wired connection may be unavailable, such as between two separate homes.

Additionally, a wireless device connected to any of the repeaters in the chain will have a throughput limited by the "weakest link" between the two nodes in the chain from which the connection originates to where the connection ends.

The security standard, Wi-Fi Protected Setup, allows embedded devices with limited graphical user interface to connect to the Internet with ease.

Wireless security

Wireless security is the prevention of unauthorized access or damage to computers using wireless networks.

The most common types of wireless security are Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

WEP is one of the least secure forms of security.

A network that is secured with WEP has been cracked in 3 minutes by the FBI .

WEP is an old IEEE 802.11 standard from 1999 which was outdated in 2003 by WPA or Wi-Fi Protected Access.

WPA was a quick alternative for those wishing to get away from the problematic WEP security.


There are some pieces of hardware that cannot support WPA2 without being replaced or having the firmware upgraded.

WPA2 uses an encryption device which encrypts the network with a 256 bit key.

This adds a multitude of security more than WEP does to the wireless network.

Many laptop computers have wireless cards pre-installed.

The ability to enter a network while mobile has great benefits.

However, wireless networking is prone to some security issues .


Crackers have found wireless networks relatively easy to break into, and even use wireless technology to crack into wired networks .

As a result, it's very important that enterprises define effective wireless security policies that guard against unauthorized access to important resources.

Wireless Intrusion Prevention Systems (WIPS) or Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS) are commonly used to enforce wireless security policies.

The risks to users of wireless technology have increased as the service has become more popular.

There were relatively few dangers when wireless technology was first introduced.


Crackers had not yet had time to latch on to the new technology and wireless was not commonly found in the work place.

However, there are a great number of security risks associated with the current wireless protocols and encryption methods, and in the carelessness and ignorance that exists at the user and corporate IT level.

Cracking methods have become much more sophisticated and innovative with wireless.

Cracking has also become much easier and more accessible with easy-to-use Windows or Linux-based tools being made available on the web at no charge.


Some organizations that have no wireless access points installed do not feel that they need to address wireless security concerns.

In-Stat MDR and META Group have estimated that 95% of all corporate laptop computers that were planned to be purchased in 2005 were equipped with wireless.

Issues can arise in a supposedly non-wireless organization when a wireless laptop is plugged into the corporate network.

A cracker could sit out in the parking lot and gather info from it through laptops and/or other devices as handhelds, or even break in through this wireless card-equipped laptop and gain access to the wired network.

One issue with corporate wireless networks in general, and WLANs in particular, involves the need for security.


Many early access points could not discern whether or not a particular user had authorization to access the network.

Although this problem reflects issues that have long troubled many types of wired networks (it has been possible in the past for individuals to plug computers into randomly available Ethernet jacks and get access to a local network), this did not usually pose a significant problem, since many organizations had reasonably good physical security.

However, the fact that radio signals bleed outside of buildings and across property lines makes physical security largely irrelevant to Piggybackers.

ALL About Wi-Fi Protected Setup

Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS; originally Wi-Fi Simple Config) is a computing standard that attempts to allow easy establishment of a secure wireless home network, but has been shown to easily fall to brute-force attacks.

A major security flaw was revealed in December 2011 that affects wireless routers with the WPS feature, which most recent models have enabled by default.

The flaw allows a remote attacker to recover the WPS PIN and, with it, the network's WPA/WPA2 pre-shared key in a few hours.


The WPS protocol defines three types of devices in a network: The WPS standard defines three basic scenarios that involve these components: The WPS protocol consists as a series of EAP message exchanges that are triggered by a user action and relies on an exchange of descriptive information that should precede that user's action.

In December 2011 researcher Stefan Viehböck reported a design and implementation flaw that makes brute-force attacks against PIN-based WPS feasible to perform on WPS-enabled Wi-Fi networks.

The ease or difficulty of exploiting this flaw is implementation dependent, as Wi-Fi router manufacturers could defend against such attacks by slowing or disabling the WPS feature after several failed PIN validation attempts.


Methods for disabling WPS have been published for some models of the following brands; In some devices, notably those made by Linksys, disabling WPS in the user interface does not result in the feature actually being disabled.

about Router (computing)

A router is a device that forwards data packets between computer networks, creating an overlay internetwork.

A router is connected to two or more data lines from different networks.

The most familiar type of routers are home and small office routers that simply pass data, such as web pages and email, between the home computers and the owner's cable or DSL modem, which connects to the Internet through an ISP.

However more sophisticated routers range from enterprise routers, which connect large business or ISP networks up to the powerful core routers that forward data at high speed along the optical fiber lines of the Internet backbone.


When multiple routers are used in interconnected networks, the routers exchange information about destination addresses, using a dynamic routing protocol.

A router has two stages of operation called planes: Routers may provide connectivity within enterprises, between enterprises and the Internet, and between internet service providers (ISPs) networks.

Smaller routers usually provide connectivity for typical home and office networks.

Distribution routers aggregate traffic from multiple access routers, either at the same site, or to collect the data streams from multiple sites to a major enterprise location.


In enterprises, a core router may provide a "collapsed backbone" interconnecting the distribution tier routers from multiple buildings of a campus, or large enterprise locations.

RFC 4098 standard defines the types of BGP-protocol routers according to the routers' functions: The very first device that had fundamentally the same functionality as a router does today, was the Interface Message Processor (IMP); IMPs were the devices that made up the ARPANET, the first packet network.

The idea for a router (called "gateways" at the time) initially came about through an international group of computer networking researchers called the International Network Working Group (INWG).