The IEEE 802 standards committee defines two separate layers, the Logical Link Control (LLC) and media access control (MAC), for the Data-Link layer of the OSI reference model. The IEEE 802.11 wireless standard defines the specifications for the physical layer and the media access control (MAC) layer that communicates up to the LLC layer, as shown in Figure 1.11.
All of the components in the 802.11 architecture fall into either the media access control (MAC) sublayer of the data-link layer or the physical layer (PHY).