VLAN tagging in WLANs

A wireless access point is operable to tag packets received from mobile clients. For example, a VLAN tag or Layer-3 tunnel tag for a packet is determined based at least in-part on a mapping between a mobile client and tag maintained by the access point. In one embodiment the access point uses Association IDs ("AIDs") to uniquely identify mobile clients in the BSS. Hence, the mapping is between A/Ds and VLAN tags/Layer-3 tunnel tags. The mapping may be generated by snooping authentication related communications or from information maintained by a switch, such as a MAC address to tag mapping.