preamble-short

preamble-short (default)

Can be used to improve the performance of 802.11g clients capable of supporting short preambles and less overhead.

Use the preamble-short configuration interface command to enable short radio preambles. The radio preamble is a selection of data at the head of a packet that contains information that the access point and client devices need when sending and receiving packets. Use the no form of the command to change back to default values.

[no] preamble-short

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Note This command is not supported on the 5-GHz access point radio interface (dot11radio1).

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Syntax Description

This command has no arguments or keywords.

Defaults

The default is short radio preamble.

Command Modes

Configuration interface

Command History

Release	Modification
12.2(4)JA	This command was introduced.

Usage Guidelines

If short radio preambles are enabled, clients may request either short or long preambles and the access point formats packets accordingly. Otherwise, clients are told to use long preambles.

Examples

This example shows how to set the radio packet to use a short preamble.

AP(config-if)# preamble-short

Part of the frame that is transmitted by an 802.11 station is called the preamble. The original 802.11 specification (which defined only 1 and 2Mbps operation), defined only a long preamble that uses a 128 bit sync field. When the "high rate", i.e. 11Mbps, 802.11b standard was created, an optional short preamble using a 56 bit "sync" field was added. This was intended to improve the efficiency of the wireless network for more "real-time" applications such as streaming video and Voice-over-IP telephony applications. Figure 1 has the gory details on the two preambles if you're interested.

Figure 1: Short and long 802.11 preambles
From: 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide , used by permission [1]

All 802.11 devices in the 2.4 GHz band, including 802.11g devices, must be able to transmit and receive long preamble frames. 802.11g devices are required to be able to transmit and receive both long and short preambles, but support for short preamble in 802.11b devices is optional.
The problem occurs when an 802.11g AP allows the use of Short Preamble by the stations it communicates with (also known as its BSS - Basic Service Set). The AP may also choose to allow legacy stations that do not support Short Preamble to associate with the BSS. If both these conditions are allowed, the legacy stations that aren't short-preamble-capable will not be able to understand much of the communication in the BSS, and most importantly won't be able to receive the all-important "Protection" frames. This could result in legacy 11b stations transmitting at the same time as 11g stations, which doesn't help either one to properly get their data sent!
This 802.11b interoperability problem has been noted in recent articles on draft-802.11g, but it looks as though it may be getting somewhat overstated. First, the short-preamble problem affects only a subset of the 802.11b products in the field. Specifically, ORiNOCO and Symbol cards and those using the Intersil PRISM 2.0 and Agere Systems chipsets.
Second, manufacturers may already have incorporated a fix for this problem into their AP code. (I've used both ORiNOCO and PRISM 2.0 based cards in my testing and have yet to run across the problem.) And finally, another reason to relax is that I'm told that the IEEE Task Group g committee will probably address this issue in the 802.11g standard after some additional debate.