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I am revising the CWNA and I was looking at ProCurve Radio Port 230 spec and came across this

?¡é?€?¡é 4 BSSIDs/16 SSIDs per radio: Multiple wireless
broadcast domains with separate security,
authentication, and policy configuration per SSID
provide access control of network resources
based on user authentication and level of trusted
security between the wireless user and the
network.

What does this mean. Can someone explain this like I am a two year old?

Thanks for you help.

4 BSSIDs/16 SSIDs per radio

The AP supports upto 16 different ESS (Extended Service Set).

Multiple wireless
broadcast domains with separate security,
authentication, and policy configuration per SSID
provide access control of network resources
based on user authentication and level of trusted
security between the wireless user and the
network.

Each ESS can be configured with different security/access parameters - like
a) Open, WEP, WPA-PERSONAL, WPA ....
b) Access like VLAN, Access control list ...

Thus each ESS is:
1) Different broadcast domain as all broadcast data should be sent to all ESS in the VLAN as they can be considered as different virtual ports.
2) Seperate security, authentication blah blah blah... coz you can set different security configurations for each ESS (again you can think of assigning these virtual ports with say dot1x, mac-auth, psk, wps etc)

My only cause of doubt is in the 4 BSSID to 16 ESS mapping. I have not worked on any products that support this way. All I can say now is that it doesnt look a good idea to be using more than 4 ESS or SSID.

Can anyone explain how 4 BSSID to 16 SSID mapping work with good interop?

Regards,
Kiran