WLAN technologies have replaced Layer 1 physical wiring and the Layer 2 transport technologies with wireless. One advantage of this replacement is that upper-layer protocols, like IP/TCP/UDP, are not usually affected. The wireless issues most often encountered include signal interference or obstruction, which are not commonly found in wired environments.
Wireless networks also have many similarities to legacy Ethernet solutions, like Layer 2 addressing that uses MAC addresses and the shared media of WLANs. In addition, WLANs’ access points (APs) act like hub devices that use the same radio frequencies (RFs) to transmit and receive packets, which results in half-duplex communication and collisions.
| Note: Wireless LAN technologies are based on a set of standards called IEEE 802.11 and they define computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6, and 5 GHz frequency bands.
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