ETSI HIPERLAN and ETSI HIPERLAN/2 Standards

ETSI HIPERLAN and ETSI HIPERLAN/2 Standards
The ETSI developed the HIPERLAN (High-Performance LAN) and HIPERLAN/2 (for WLANs) technologies
concurrently with IEEE’s work on 802.11. HIPERLAN achieves a 54-Mbps data transmission
rate, made possible by the use of a modularization method called OFDM [463].5 In HIPERLAN/2
networks, mobile terminals wirelessly connect to APs that are wired to a fixed, wired LAN. When
the mobile terminals move out of range of their current AP, they are handed off to the closest AP.
HIPERLAN/2 connections can be assigned a priority level for quality of service purposes, depending
on an application’s bandwidth needs and jitter tolerance [463]. The HIPERLAN/2 APs have a
built-in support for automatic transmission frequency allocation within the APs coverage area. This
is performed by the Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) function. An appropriate radio channel
is selected on the basis of what radio channels are already in use by other APs and to minimize
interference with the environment [463].
Mobile terminals and APs must authenticate to each other; each node has a HIPERLAN ID (HID)
and a Node ID (NID) which uniquely identify the station. Encryption is used in communications to
guard against eavesdroppers and MiM attacks [463].
The HIPERLAN/2 protocol model contains a PHY, a datal link control (DLC) layer, and a
convergence layer (CL). The DLC consists of several sublayers: a MAC protocol sublayer, a radio
link control (RLC) sublayer, and an EC sublayer. There is a radio link control protocol (RCP) for
the following tasks: DLC connection control (DCC), radio resource control (RRC), and association
control (AC). There are two models for the CL: cell based and packet based. The CL manages service
requests from higher layers to the DLC [463].