ZyXEL Communications P660HN-Fx User Manual

Chapter 6 Wireless

ADSL Series User’s Guide

How WPS works

The roles of registrar and enrollee last only as long as the WPS setup process is active (two 
minutes). The next time you use WPS, a different device can be the registrar if necessary.

The WPS connection process is like a handshake; only two devices participate in each WPS 
transaction. If you want to add more devices you should repeat the process with one of the existing 
networked devices and the new device.

Note that the access point (AP) is not always the registrar, and the wireless client is not always the 
enrollee. All WPS-certified APs can be a registrar, and so can some WPS-enabled wireless clients.

By default, a WPS devices is “unconfigured”. This means that it is not part of an existing network 
and can act as either enrollee or registrar (if it supports both functions). If the registrar is 
unconfigured, the security settings it transmits to the enrollee are randomly-generated. Once a 
WPS-enabled device has connected to another device using WPS, it becomes “configured”. A 
configured wireless client can still act as enrollee or registrar in subsequent WPS connections, but a 
configured access point can no longer act as enrollee. It will be the registrar in all subsequent WPS 
connections in which it is involved. If you want a configured AP to act as an enrollee, you must reset 
it to its factory defaults.

This section shows how security settings are distributed in an example WPS setup.

The following figure shows an example network. In step 1, both AP1 and Client 1 are 
unconfigured. When WPS is activated on both, they perform the handshake. In this example, AP1 
is the registrar, and Client 1 is the enrollee. The registrar randomly generates the security 
information to set up the network, since it is unconfigured and has no existing information.