Uses of BSSID

BSSID is frequently used in wireless networking to designate different portions of a wireless local area network.

The BSSIDs in their network environment are critical for IT administrators to monitor, although end users are typically just concerned with the SSID.

BSSID and SSID are both important factors to consider as an IT network administrator.

This is because each WLAN often contains many access points.

BSSIDs are typically used to distinguish between access points and identify them.

Although switching from one BSS to another is automatic and has no effect on the user’s connectivity or availability, the IT administrator will still need to be aware of this information.

This can be required, for example, if there is too much traffic in one area of the network or if you need to locate a particular customer.

We have also spoken about several ways to locate the BSSID for monitoring or maintenance.

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.