Beacon frame is one of the management frames in IEEE 802.11 based WLANs. It contains all the information about the network. Beacon frames are transmitted periodically, they serve to announce the presence of a wireless LAN and to synchronise the members of the service set. Beacon frames are transmitted by the access point (AP) in an infrastructure basic service set (BSS). In IBSS network beacon generation is distributed among the stations. For the 2.4 GHz spectrum, when having more than 15 SSIDs on non-overlapping channels (or more than 45 in total), beacon frames start to consume significant amount of air time and degrade performance even when most of the networks are idle. Components Beacon frames consist of an 802.11 MAC header, body and FCS. Some of the fields in the body are listed below. SSID Supported rates Frequency-hopping (FH) Parameter Set Direct-Sequence (DS) Parameter Set Contention-Free (CF) Parameter Set IBSS Parameter Set Traffic indication map (TIM) Infrastructure network access points send beacons at a defined interval, which is often set to a default 100 TU which is equivalent to 102.4 ms. In the case of an ad hoc network where there are no access points, a peer station is responsible for sending the beacon. After an ad hoc station receives a beacon frame from a peer, it waits a random amount of time. After that random timeout has elapsed, it will send a beacon frame unless another station has already sent one. In this way, the responsibility of sending beacon frames is rotated amongst all the peers in the ad hoc network, while ensuring that beacons will always be sent. Most access points allow the changing of the beacon interval. Increasing the beacon interval will cause the beacons to be sent less frequently. This reduces load on the network and increases throughput for clients on the network; however, it has the undesirable effect of delaying association and roaming processes as stations scanning for access points could potentially miss a beacon while scanning other channels. Alternatively, decreasing the beacon interval causes beacons to be sent more frequently. This increases load on the network and decreases throughput for users, but it does result in a quicker association and roaming process. An additional downside of decreasing the beacon interval is that stations in power save mode will consume more power as they must more frequently awake to receive beacons. Inspecting an idle network