Uses of BSSID

BSSID in short is the AP’s physical or MAC address, which is 48-bit long hexadecimal numbers.

As a wireless user, you don’t see BSSID but it’s included in wireless packages/frames.

Most of the time, there are different BSSIDs on an access point for each WLAN configured on a radio.

By convention, an access point’s Mac address is used as a BSS identifier (BSSID).

So if you know the MAC address, you know what the BSSID is—and, since all packets contain the originator’s BSSID, you can trace a packet.

This works fine for an access point that has a radio and WLAN configured.

If you have an access point with 2 radios and 32 WLANs configured on each, you would have 64 BSSIDs plus the base BSSID of the access point.

Individual access points are assigned to unique 64 MAC address blocks to accommodate multiple BSSIDs.