Experimental Intranet services over Swinburne's 802.11b wireless infrastructure

This paper falls under the MAGIC project which deals with mobile wireless networks. As part of the MAGIC project, we wished to advertise our presence and demonstrate the sorts of services wireless technology can provide. Swinburne University has as part of its IT infrastructure a wireless network covering the Hawthorn Campus. It is worth leveraging this infrastructure to further the research goals of the group. To this end, an EPIA mini-ITX PC was configured using FreeBSD to provide local Intranet services to the Swinburne Wireless Infrastructure (Swinnet). Swinnet consists of a number of Access Points distributed around campus. The 802.11b traffic is bridged between Access Points through the Swinburne ethernet backbone on a specific VLAN. To enable the desktop PC to access this traffic, that VLAN traffic was trunked to the particular wall socket to which the PC is attached. Native ethernet packets are therefore presented to (or from) the desktop box so as it appears to reside on the 802.11b network ethernet segment.