Gateway (telecommunications) in the context of "WLAN"

A personal area network (PAN) is a computer network for interconnecting electronic devices within an individual person's workspace. A PAN provides data transmission among devices such as computers, smartphones, tablets and personal digital assistants. PANs can be used for communication among the personal devices themselves, or for connecting to a higher level network and the Internet where one master device takes up the role as gateway.

A PAN may be carried over wired interfaces such as USB, but is predominantly carried wirelessly, also called a wireless personal area network (WPAN). A PAN is wirelessly carried over a low-powered, short-distance wireless network technology such as IrDA, Wireless USB, Bluetooth, NearLink or Zigbee. The reach of a WPAN varies from a few centimeters to a few meters. WPANs specifically tailored for low-power operation of the sensors are sometimes also called low-power personal area network (LPPAN) to better distinguish them from low-power wide-area network (LPWAN).

The end-to-end (E2E) principle is a design principle in computer networking that requires application-specific features (such as reliability and security) to be implemented in the communicating end nodes of the network, instead of in the network itself. Intermediary nodes (such as gateways and routers) that exist to establish the network may still implement these features to improve efficiency but do not guarantee end-to-end functionality.

The essence of what would later be called the end-to-end principle was contained in the work of Donald Davies on packet-switched networks in the 1960s. Louis Pouzin pioneered the use of the end-to-end strategy in the CYCLADES network in the 1970s. The principle was first articulated explicitly in 1981 by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark. The meaning of the end-to-end principle has been continuously reinterpreted ever since its initial articulation. Noteworthy formulations of the end-to-end principle can be found before the seminal 1981 Saltzer, Reed, and Clark paper.

Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and computer networks, such as the Internet.

In packet switching networks, routing is the higher-level decision-making that directs network packets from their source toward their destination through intermediate network nodes by specific packet forwarding mechanisms. Packet forwarding is the transit of network packets from one network interface to another. Intermediate nodes are typically network hardware devices such as routers, gateways, firewalls, or switches. General-purpose computers also forward packets and perform routing, although they have no specially optimized hardware for the task.

The internet layer is a group of internetworking methods, protocols, and specifications in the Internet protocol suite that are used to transport network packets from the originating host across network boundaries; if necessary, to the destination host specified by an IP address. The internet layer derives its name from its function facilitating internetworking, which is the concept of connecting multiple networks with each other through gateways.

The internet layer does not include the protocols that fulfill the purpose of maintaining link states between the local nodes and that usually use protocols that are based on the framing of packets specific to the link types. Such protocols belong to the link layer. Internet-layer protocols use IP-based packets.

Tethering or phone-as-modem (PAM) is the sharing of a mobile device's cellular data connection with other connected computers. It effectively turns the transmitting device into a modem to allow others to use its cellular network as a gateway for Internet access. The sharing can be done wirelessly over wireless LAN (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth, IrDA or by physical connection using a cable like USB. If tethering is done over Wi-Fi, the feature may be branded as a personal hotspot or mobile hotspot, and the transmitting mobile device would also act as a portable wireless access point (AP) which may also be protected using a password. Tethering over Bluetooth may use the Personal Area Networking (PAN) profile between paired devices, or alternatively the Dial-Up Networking (DUN) profile where the receiving device virtually dials the cellular network APN, typically using the number *99#.