A WiFi Ghost frame is a term widely used in the WiFi community lately. It is not a part of the 802.11 standard, it is just a term many uses.
Some say it is a frame the receiver don’t hear, other say the receiver don’t understand. Both are wrong.
So what is it?. I will try to explain.
Andrew McHale wrote a blog last week on “Will we be able to capture 802.11ax frames“. Since I was mentioned in it, I have to answer. I jump straight to the core and if you need some background, read Andrews blog
I will in this article try to explain some aspect regarding 802.11ax ODFMA wireless capturing, and suggest how it could be done in the future
Some days ago I helped my son when he complained about slow wifi in his rented apartment in Lisboa. To do this we used iOS app Airport to visualize the network.
I thought this process could be documented in a blog
With the introduction of 802.11ax and the newly released frequency band for 802.11 transmission in the 6GHz band (WiFi6E) there have been talks about allowing only 802.11ax frame formats in WiFi6E. A week ago Jim Vajda (@jimvajda) released a blog article on “Whats Different About 802.11ax in 6Ghz“. This article concluded with the use of 802.11a, or non-HT, frame format for some types of control and management frames, and 802.11ax (HE) frame format for the rest.
In this article, I will describe airtime consumption for those two frame formats and show where 802.11a/non-HT frame formats consume less airtime than 802.11ax/HE frame format.
This article is only regarding airtime consumption for single user frame types. Multi-user frame types in 802.11ax/HE solve other issues.
In our eagerness to learn new stuff all the time it is sometimes useful to have the basic WiFi knowledge repeated.
I do, approximately once a year, listen or look through some webinars/podcasts/presentations which are available online. This is nice to do when I’m driving between locations.
Read More »I made a Kahoot challenge last week. But because of different subscription models only 20 could attend. The winner in that challenge had 8 correct answers out of 10 questions.
I make this blog with the same challenge so everyone who wishes can test themself.
First is the 10 question, each with 4 options.
Then the same 10 questions with the correct answers, and some explanation
In Wireshark version 3.2.1 for Windows, there is a field where the value of the Rate and the Length subfield from the Legacy Signal field in the Physical header is shown for 802.11ax aggregated frames
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Let us use this and have some fun.
802.11 Frame Aggregation is the technology in WiFi that enables the sender/transmitter to “pack” together several frames and send them in one frame transmission, a TXOP.
I will in this case study drill down in a frame capture and interpret the different parts of an 802.11ax aggregated frame transmission, both a single-user transmission (OFDM) and a multi-user transmission (OFDMA).
The wireless capture I use in this case study contains two-level aggregation, where A-MSDU is sent inside an A-MPDU.
Read More »
During Wireless LAN Professional Conference 2019 (WLPC_EU) in Prague, I had a presentation where the WiFi AirTime Calculator was presented. You can read about it and download it from here. And I used the results from the calculator to look at data rate versus throughput in a WiFi network.
Note
This is a theoretical approach and we assume it is no other traffic in the BSS or on the channel. And it is on a 20 MHz channel at the 5 GHz.
A Data field size of 300 bytes is used in this article. I call it the Data field size, other common names are payloads, MPDU, A-MPDU or frame body. The Data field is the correct name according to the standard and it embraces all frame format types.
Gjermund Raaen 