Sometimes when I teach folks to use Protocol Analyzing tools, they don’t know where to start. So I have them go through the following table as a quick review of 802.11 behaviors. If you know how 802.11 is supposed to work, really understand the protocol, then with very little information you can make judgments about how your wireless network is working.
Here are the ‘basics’ that every Wireless LAN Professional needs to understand intrinsically. This should be fairly second nature to you.
So if you see a network with lots and lots of Management frames, and hardly any Data or Control frames, you can deduce you have an ‘Idle’ network. Learning to recognize these ‘ratios’ will help in your troubleshooting efforts.
If you have any small tables or ‘tricks’ on how use troubleshoot your wireless networks, please send them along to [email protected]
