Chapter 8 - Convergence on Wireless Networks

Abstract

This chapter discusses various aspects of convergence on wireless networks. The largest and most effective opportunities for wireless local area network (WLAN)-based telephony are in the corporate enterprise. The corporate world has been the first area to embrace wireless LANs. These businesses can control coverage area, bandwidth utilization, and Quality of Service (QoS) implementations. The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is 802.11's optional encryption standard implemented in the MAC layer that most radio network interface card (NIC) and access point vendors support. As part of the encryption process, WEP prepares a key schedule by concatenating the shared secret key supplied by the user of the sending station with a random-generated 24-bit initialization vector (IV). The IV lengthens the life of the secret key because the station can change the IV for each frame transmission. The use of IEEE 802.IX offers an effective framework for authenticating and controlling user traffic to a protected network, as well as dynamically varying encryption keys. The Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), initially referred to as WEP2, is an interim solution that fixes the key reuse problem of WEP that is periodically using the same key to encrypt data. It is found that an advantage of using TKIP is that companies having existing WEP-based access points and radio NICs can upgrade to TKIP through relatively simple firmware patches.