802.11 frame types

In the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN protocols (such as Wi-Fi), a MAC frame is constructed of common fields (which are present in all types of frames) and specific fields (present in certain cases, depending on the type and subtype specified in the first octet of the frame).

The very first two octets transmitted by a station are the Frame Control. The first three subfields within the frame control and the last field (FCS) are always present in all types of 802.11 frames. These three subfields consist of two bits Protocol Version subfield, two bits Type subfield, and four bits Subtype subfield.

The first three fields (Protocol Version, Type and Subtype) in the Frame Control field are always present. The fields, in their order of appearance in transmission, are:

1. Protocol Version
2. Type
3. Subtype
4. To-DS
5. From-DS
6. More-Fragments
7. Retry
8. Power Management
9. More Data
10. Protected frame
11. +HTC/order

The two-bit protocol version subfield is set to 0 for WLAN (PV0) and 1 for IEEE 802.11ah (PV1). The revision level is incremented only when there is a fundamental incompatibility between two versions of the standard.^[1][2] PV1 description is incorporated in the latest 802.11-2020 standard.

Action frames extend management frames to control a certain action. Some of the action categories are QoS, Block Ack, Public, Radio Measurement, Fast BSS Transition, Mesh Peering Management, etc. These frames are sent by a station when it needs to tell its peer for a certain action to be taken.

For example, a station can tell another station to set up a block acknowledgement by sending an ADDBA Request action frame. The other station would then respond with an ADDBA Response action frame.

Wi-Fi Neighbor Awareness Networking (NAN), also known as Wi-Fi Aware, service discovery frames are NAN-specific public action frames.^[4] They are used in Remote ID for example.^[5]

ToDS is one bit in length and set to 1 if destined to Distribution System,^[6] while FromDS is a one-bit length that is set to 1 if originated from Distribution System.^[6]

Set to 1 if the Data or Management frame is part retransmission of the earlier frame. This bit is reused for different purpose in Control frame.

Set to 1 if the Management Frame is protected by encryption as described in IEEE_802.11w-2009.

It is one bit in length and is used for two purposes:

• It is set to 1 in a non-QoS data frame transmitted by a non-QoS WLAN station to indicate the frame being transmitted is using Strictly-Ordered service class (this use is obsolete and will be removed from the future 802.11 Standard).
• It is set to 1 in a QoS data or management frame transmitting at HT or higher rate to indicate that the frame contains HT Control field (see above)