First, I had to turn my wife's EeePC into a perfect wi-fi packets capturing machine. I did this by preparing a Live USB 'persistent' Ubuntu on a flash drive USB key, and installing aircrack-ng and Wireshark on it. This made it possible for me to capture every wi-fi packet in the air including wi-fi management packets, which were the ones I was mainly interested in.
Then I needed a wi-fi access point (or router) because I don't have one at home. Just when I was going to visit my brother and run some tests at his home, his router broke. Lucky, uh? Fortunately then I could borrow one from a co-worker, so I could go on.
The first test I planned to run was to capture the full association process between my DS Lite and the access point using a regular DS wi-fi enabled game. During this process the DS informs the router about his wi-fi capabilities, and I wanted to gather that information. Stephen Stair (sgstair), dswifi library author, says that the DS doesn't seem capable of transmitting packets at data rates other than 1 Mbps or 2 Mbps, but admits he never investigated about the receiving speed capabilities... so I decided to start from here.
So my DS Lite informs the router that it can operate at all four 802.11b data rates: 1, 2, 5.5 and 11 Mbps. Nice! I could also see from the captured packets that the DS never sends any packet to the router at data rates higher than 2 Mbps, so sgstair was right about that.
Knowing that the associated device (my DS Lite) can operate at data rates up to 11 Mbps, the router tried to communicate with it using that speed... with no luck at all. After sending some packets and receiving no acknowledgments, the router resent the packets using the lowest data rate possible (1 Mbps) and of course the DS acknowledged that. At this point the router (at least the Netgear I'm using for these tests) decided it wasn't worth to continue sending packets at the highest speed and switched to sending at 5.5 Mbps instead. However, no luck again as the DS unfortunately didn't acknowledge a single packet sent at that data rate.
So it really looks like the DS is only capable of sending and receiving packets at rates up to 2 Mbps, not faster... but it also looks like the WFC-enabled game I'm using isn't sending correct capability informations to the router. But that's just not true. The reason is that the router I'm using requires that the equipment willing to communicate be able to do so using every data rate in the required subset of data rates, which are the ones with high-order bit (0x80) set. This subset is called 'BSSBasicRateSet' in case you want to check yourself (I really had to download the whole big bloated 1233 pages "IEEE 802.11-2007 Standard" document to check that!) In short, the DS lies to the router so that it doesn't refuse the connection by providing the following error: "Association denied due to requesting [device] not supporting all of the data rates in the BSSBasicRateSet parameter".
That's a pity, really. But anyway it was somewhat fun.