The Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP) protocol is a standard, interoperable networking protocol that enables a central
wireless LAN
A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network
A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes.
Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and bus ...
''Access Controller (AC)'' to manage a collection of ''Wireless Termination Points (WTPs)'', more commonly known as
wireless access point
In computer networking, a wireless access point (WAP), or more generally just access point (AP), is a networking hardware device that allows other Wi-Fi devices to connect to a wired network. As a standalone device, the AP may have a wired co ...
s. The protocol specification is described in RFC 5415.
Protocol overview
CAPWAP is based on
Lightweight Access Point Protocol (LWAPP). The state machine of CAPWAP is similar to LWAPP's, but with the addition of a full
Datagram Transport Layer Security
Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) is a communications protocol providing security to datagram-based applications by allowing them to communicate in a way designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery. The DTLS protocol i ...
(DTLS) tunnel establishment. The standard provides configuration management and device management, allowing for configurations and firmware to be pushed to access points (APs). Because the overall state design of the CAPWAP protocol is largely the same as the
finite-state machine (FSM) in LWAPP, a detailed diagram is not needed.
The protocol uses a generic encapsulation and transport mechanism, making it independent of a specific radio technology. The specification of CAPWAP for a particular wireless technology is called a ''binding''. An
IEEE 802.11
IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer commun ...
binding is provided in RFC 5416.
CAPWAP uses
UDP ports 5246 (control channel) and 5247 (data channel).
Implementations
An example software implementation of CAPWAP is OpenCAPWAP.
See also
*
Lightweight Access Point Protocol (LWAPP) used to manage a large set of WAPs
*
Wireless LAN
A wireless LAN (WLAN) is a wireless computer network
A wireless network is a computer network that uses wireless data connections between network nodes.
Wireless networking is a method by which homes, telecommunications networks and bus ...
- networks consisting of one or more access points plus one or more devices
References
IEEE 802.11
Network access
Telecommunications infrastructure
Wireless networking
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