Wireless N300 Home Router 
 
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Appendix 2 Glossary 
Channel 
A communication channel, also known as channel, refers either to a 
physical transmission medium such as a wire or to a logical connection 
over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel. It is used to transfer 
an information signal, such as a digital bit stream, from one or more 
transmitters to one or more receivers. If there is only one AP in the range, 
select any channel you like. The default is Auto. 
If there are several APs coexisting in the same area, it is advisable that 
you select a different channel for each AP to operate on, minimizing the 
interference between neighboring APs. For example, if 3 American- 
standard APs coexist in one area, you can set their channels respectively 
to 1, 6 and 11 to avoid mutual interference. 
 
SSID  
Service set identifier (SSID) is used to identify a particular 802.11 
wireless LAN. It is the name of a specific wireless network. To let your 
wireless network adapter roam among different APs, you must set all 
APs’ SSID to the same name. 
 
WPA/WPA2 
The WPA protocol implements the majority of the IEEE 802.11i standard. 
It enhances data encryption through the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol 
(TKIP) which is a 128-bit per-packet key, meaning that it dynamically 
generates a new key for each packet. WPA also includes a message 
integrity check feature to prevent data packets from being hampered 
with. Only authorized network users can access the wireless network. 
The later WPA2 protocol features compliance with the full IEEE 802.11i 
standard and uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in addition to 
TKIP encryption protocol to guarantee better security than that provided 
by WEP or WPA. Currently, WPA is supported by Windows XP SP1. 
 
IEEE 802.1X Authentication 
IEEE 802.1X Authentication is an IEEE Standard for port-based Network 
Access Control (PNAC). It is part of the IEEE 802.1 group of networking 
protocols. It provides an authentication mechanism to devices wishing to 
attach to a LAN or WLAN.IEEE 802.1X defines the encapsulation of EAP 
over LAN or EAPOL. 802.1X authentication involves three parties: a