A BSSID with a value of all 1s is used to indicate the wildcard BSSID, usable only during probe requests or for communications that take place outside the context of a BSS. From the point of view of a wireless clients, IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networks appear as a conventional infrastructure mode topology, and are centrally configured as such. The formation of the mesh's BSS, as well as wireless traffic management (including path selection and forwarding) is negotiated between the nodes (redistribution points) of the mesh infrastructure. The mesh's BSS is distinct from the networks (which may also be wireless) used by a mesh's redistribution points to communicate with one another. In contrast to the stations in an infrastructure-mode network, the stations in a wireless ad hoc network communicate directly with one another, i.e. without a dependence on a distribution point to relay traffic between them. In this form of peer-to-peer wireless networking, the peers form an independent basic service set (IBSS). Some of the responsibilities of a distribution point such as defining network parameters and other "beaconing" functions are established by the first station in an ad-hoc network. But that station does not relay traffic between the other stations; instead, the peers communicate directly with one another. Like infrastructure-BSSs, independent-BSSs also have a 48-bit MAC address-like identifier. But unlike infrastructure-BSS identifiers, independent-BSSs identifiers are not necessarily unique: the individual/group bit of the address is always set to 0 (individual), the universal/local bit of the address is always set to 1 (local), and the remaining 46 bits are randomly generated. The SSID is broadcast by stations in beacon packets to announce the presence of a network. Unlike basic service set identifiers, SSIDs are usually customizable. These SSIDs can be zero to 32 octets (32 bytes) long, and are, for convenience, usually in a natural language, such as English. The 802.11 standards prior to the 2012 edition did not define any particular encoding/representation for SSIDs, which were expected to be treated and handled as an arbitrary sequence of 032 octets that are not limited to printable characters. The IEEE 802.11-2012 defines a tag that the SSID is UTF-8 encoded and when interpreting could contain any non-ISO basic Latin characters within it. Wireless network stacks must still be prepared to handle arbitrary values in the SSID field.