IEEE 802.11 – Difference Between Frame and Packets in IEEE 802.11

ieee 802.11

I am new here and hope I can get some help!

Recently I have been learning the Physical Layer PHY specifications of IEEE.802.11 i.e the WLAN standards. A tutorial I have used defines the general PHY packet structure that has a Long training field, short training field, signal field, data field.

It also defines three different types of frames: Management, Control and Data frames. And that each frame consists of MAC header, payload and frame check sequence.
One example of frame is beacon frame.

Confusion is, what is the difference between packet and frame? I am totally confused. Does anyone have a clear explanation and understand of each.

Thanks

Best Answer

The term packet can be ambiguous, so the standards often use 'acronym soup' to avoid such ambiguity. In particular, often 'packet' is taken to be the layer above 'frame' (i.e. level 3 of the OSI model).

However, as you have found out, that's not always so. Here the discussion is about physical (layer 1) IEEE 802.11 packets. So the frame is encapsulated within the data field of the packet, not the other way round.

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