How Wi-Fi Works?
A Wi-Fi network an access point provides a WLAN or wireless local area network and a Wi-Fi enabled device uses that wireless network in order to communicate. Both of these devices are referred to as stations, but to keep things separate here, I'll call them access point and client. the access point or AP that broadcasts the wireless signal is itself connected to a local network. And the AP takes traffic from that network and broadcasts that wireless LEAP. And it does the opposite as well, accepting wireless signals from clients and communicating their data back to the network that it's attached to. Most people use Wi-Fi access points that are combined with a router and a switch. And that's what these all in one boxes we see in many homes and small businesses are. Wi-Fi is just a part of them. We'll take a look at that in more depth later in the course, but it's important to remember that the access point is the part of the whole arrangement that creates a wireless network. In order to distinguish itself from other nearby networks, a Wi-Fi network has a name that humans and computers can read, and this is called the SSID or a service set identifier. This is what we see when we choose a wireless network from a list. And it's how a computer or device knows to connect to the right network.
That's not usually a good idea though. Access points operate kind of like an ethernet hub rather than any ethernet switch. A hub like the AP, broadcasts all of the IP traffic it gets to all clients and the client for which the packets are intended, we'll read them. Other clients will ignore the packets that aren't meant for them. As more devices are added to a Wi-Fi network, the bandwidth of the network is divided further and further between them, and the traffic that each device needs to process increases. I say that access points operate kind of like an ethernet hub because they also act as a bridge, translating data between layer two and layer three of the network stack. Regular ethernet hubs don't have this translation role. In most cases, we don't use ethernet hubs at all anymore.