Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible.

Wireshark's powerful features make it the tool of choice for network troubleshooting, protocol development, and education worldwide. Wireshark was written by an international group of networking experts, and is an example of the power of open source. It runs on Windows, Linux, UNIX, and other platforms.

In this Wireshark Tutorial we will look at how to decode wireless lan 802.11 packets and understand them using Wireshark. This will be particularly useful if you desire to write your own wireless lan monitoring , wireless lan management or wireless lan security product.