01. Two analysts capture the same busy BSS at the same moment from adjacent desks, using different adapters and drivers. Both files decode the same frames, but the per-frame signal and noise values differ noticeably between them.
What is the correct reading of that difference?
a) The frames were re-transmitted between the two captures, so the analysts recorded different attempts.
b) One capture must be corrupt — a single transmission carries one signal value.
c) Those values are added locally by each capturing driver, so they describe the receiver rather than the frame.
d) The APs adjusted transmit power between the two captures, which the values record.
02. An operator insists the guest BSS is advertising a 40 MHz channel width and that legacy 802.11b clients have been excluded from it. A capture taken beside the AP shows beacons whose HT Operation element reports a 20 MHz STA channel width, and whose supported-rate set still lists the lowest DSSS rate as a basic rate.
What has the capture established?
a) The BSS is operating differently from what the operator believes, on both counts.
b) The clients are ignoring the advertised width and falling back, which the beacon cannot show.
c) The beacon is stale and a fresh capture on the operating channel would show the intended settings.
d) Nothing yet — channel width and rate policy are controller-side settings that beacons do not carry.
03. Voice calls are choppy on the wireless side only. A capture on the switch port feeding the AP shows the RTP stream marked with an expedited-forwarding code point. An over-the-air capture of the same call, taken beside the AP, shows the downlink frames as QoS data frames whose QoS Control field carries a best-effort user priority.
What does the pair of captures indicate?
a) Downlink frames from an AP always carry a best-effort user priority, with the access categories governing the contention of client stations only.
b) The client is not WMM-capable, leaving the AP with no prioritized queue to place its traffic in, so everything for that station falls to best effort.
c) Wired marking is not being translated into the matching access category, so the stream contends with best-effort parameters on air.
d) The payload is encrypted over the air, so the AP cannot inspect the RTP headers to classify the stream and defaults it to best effort.
04. A station reports poor throughput. Beside that station the analyzer shows a high count of frames with a failed frame check sequence from the AP, and an equally elevated count of frames from the AP carrying the retry bit set.
What does the pairing of those two counts indicate?
a) Frames are arriving damaged at this position, so the fault is at the radio layer rather than in configuration.
b) The analyzer is mis-decoding a rate it does not support, so neither count reflects the air.
c) The AP has a full transmit queue, with retries otherwise accompanying every corrupted frame.
d) The acknowledgements are being lost on the return path, which is what a corrupted-frame count measures.
05. Users on one channel of a campus WLAN report that they cannot get onto the network at all, while their devices show the AP at full signal strength. A real-time view of that part of the band shows a persistent block of energy that stays up without the on-and-off pattern that framed traffic produces, and the utilization reading for that portion of the band is close to saturated for as long as the analyzer watches.
A capture held on the affected channel records long stretches with no frames at all; the few frames that do appear are heavily retried, and no association exchange runs to completion.
What does this combination indicate?
a) A dense group of co-channel BSSs has saturated the medium, so the served stations rarely win a transmit opportunity.
b) A continuously transmitting non-802.11 source is holding the channel occupied. Carrier sense keeps the stations from getting a turn, and what does get out cannot be recovered by its receiver, which is why a strong signal reading sits alongside outright failure.
c) The noise floor has been lifted by a distant BSS on an overlapping channel, and the clients' signal indicator, which reports received power rather than margin, is concealing the loss.
d) The AP is rejecting the clients' association requests, so they retry the exchange without ever reaching the step that follows it.
06. A beacon decode from the BSS under investigation shows an EDCA Parameter Set in which the voice access category carries a lower AIFSN and a narrower contention-window range than best effort, and a non-zero TXOP limit where the best-effort limit is zero.
Which two conclusions does this parameter set support?
(Choose two.)
a) Traffic arriving from the wired side with a high-priority code point lands in the voice queue, since this parameter set defines the mapping the AP applies to incoming frames.
b) Voice begins its countdown after a shorter arbitration wait and completes it in fewer slots on average, so that queue reaches the medium more often than best effort.
c) Voice frames receive a bounded latency guarantee, since a non-zero transmit opportunity limit is what admission control uses to reserve airtime for the category.
d) A station winning the medium for voice may send a burst of frames inside the granted transmit opportunity, where a best-effort winner sends one exchange and contends again.
07. A client roams between two APs in the same ESS every few minutes. A capture on the new AP's channel shows, for each roam: a Reassociation Request carrying a PMKID, a Reassociation Response with a success status, and then four EAPOL-Key frames before user traffic resumes.
What does the presence of those four frames establish about the roam?
a) The client failed the roam and is re-joining from scratch, which is why a handshake appears at all.
b) The cached key was rejected, so the client is repeating the full authentication it performed at the first AP.
c) The roam used the fast-transition exchange, which is what carries key material inside the reassociation frames.
d) The cached key was accepted, and only the pairwise keys are being derived again for the new AP.
08. Throughput on a 2.4 GHz BSS sits far below what the clients' negotiated rates suggest it should reach. In the capture, nearly every downlink burst from the AP is preceded by a short control frame that the AP addresses to its own MAC address. That frame is sent at a rate every station on the channel can demodulate, and its Duration value covers the burst that follows.
Which explanation fits this evidence?
a) The AP is claiming a transmit opportunity long enough to carry a large aggregate it has queued for a single station.
b) Stations that cannot demodulate the AP's data transmissions share the channel, so each burst is announced at a rate they can hear and their NAV holds them off the medium.
c) A hidden node has been identified, and the frame reserves the medium on that node's behalf so its traffic does not collide with the burst.
d) An unacknowledged frame is being retransmitted, and the duration covers the retry that follows.
09. A monitor-mode capture taken beside an access point shows the AP send a short control frame addressed to a group of its associated stations. Immediately afterward, still inside the same exchange, the AP transmits a PPDU that the analyzer lists with a PHY header but with no decodable MAC payload. Each of two addressed stations then returns a report frame to the AP.
What is this exchange?
a) A block ack request with its responses, gathering the acknowledgment status of an aggregate the AP sent earlier in the same transmit opportunity.
b) A power-save delivery exchange in which the stations signal that they are awake.
c) An RTS/CTS protection exchange in which the addressed stations confirm they will defer for the duration the AP reserved.
d) A sounding exchange whose reports supply the channel information used to steer later transmissions.
10. An analyst is asked to demonstrate, from a capture of a client's first join to a WPA2-Personal BSS, the exact frame in which the access point hands that client the key it will use to decrypt broadcast and multicast traffic.
Which frame carries that key to the client?
a) The RSN information element carried in the AP's beacon
b) The first message of the Group Key Handshake
c) Message 3 of the 4-Way Handshake
d) Message 1 of the 4-Way Handshake, sent before the supplicant has replied