A wireless local area network (WLAN) links two or more devices using some wireless distribution method (typically spread-spectrum or OFDM radio), and usually providing a connection through an access point to the wider internet.

IEEE 802.11 defines the physical layer (PHY) and MAC (Media Access Control) layers based on CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance). The 802.11 specification includes provisions designed to minimize collisions.

The 802.11 has two basic modes of operation: Ad hoc mode enables peer-to-peer transmission between mobile units. Infrastructure mode in which mobile units communicate through an access point that serves as a bridge to a wired network infrastructure is the more common wireless LAN application the one being covered. Since wireless communication uses a more open medium for communication in comparison to wired LANs, the 802.11 designers also included shared-key encryption mechanisms: Wired equivalent privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi protected access (WPA, WPA2), to secure wireless computer networks.

Posedge’s Wireless Packet Processor (WPP) is a highly programmable Packet Processing engine that can be used to realize scalable, high performance, application aware Access Points/Base-Stations for Wireless LAN and LTE.

WPP routes multi-gigabits of data and provides sophisticated Quality of Service (QoS) with bandwidth shared across large number of clients offloading the Host Processor significantly.

WPP provides a Policy framework unified across wired and wireless Layer-2-Layer-4 across the LAN to support applications like Voice over WiFi and Video over WiFi, which require end-to-end QoS. In addition the Policy framework allows policies based on User-ID, Location etc.

The application aware engine supports identification packet flow for protocols like Skype, MSN and Bit-Torrent and applies configured QoS parameters to the identified flows.