Investing in Wireless and Mobility for a Competitive Edge

Increasing worker mobility and the growing demand for integrated mobile applications and tools are driving many organizations to evolve their network infrastructure.

To deliver true enterprise mobility, organizations of all sizes must embrace the development of a resilient, integrated, and adaptive network infrastructure optimized for wireless data, voice and IP communications. This network, when architected correctly, will provide a trusted and secure foundation for seamless and cost-effective connectivity between a variety of desktop and mobile devices and enterprise and consumer applications.

According to research firm Gartner, by 2009 “Fifty percent of enterprises will have migrated from tactical mobile application silos (supporting a single application) to strategic platforms capable of supporting multiple applications, managing devices and securing data transport”. [1]

This unification of mobile applications will result in a number of significant benefits including a predictability of operation and performance that allows organizations to maximize cost efficiencies, drive productivity and easily adopt and integrate next-generation mobility technologies and applications as they emerge.

Wireless Local Area Networks and Mobility
A key component of any integrated mobile platform is a wireless local area network (WLAN). Today, many organizations deploy internal wireless networks with products based on 802.11 standards and specifications ratified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE).

These networks are deployed as a productivity tool in the workplace to connect workers within a building or across a campus-wide environment and as restricted wireless guest networks often deployed as a convenience for visiting customers, suppliers and others. Wireless networks have become a proven fast and reliable medium to access critical business information at the point-of-need, whether it is in a conference room, classroom, on the manufacturing floor, or in a hospital operating or waiting room.

According to research firm In-Stat, approximately 75% of U.S. businesses have at least one wireless data application and the number of worldwide mobile workers reported by IDC is expected to reach 1 billion by 2011. In fact, wireless has become a key information systems element in industry segments such as enterprise, healthcare and education because of its ability to provide quick and secure access to internal data and the Internet from any point within a wireless network.

The basic strategic benefits of wireless within the workplace are many, including improved worker productivity, faster access to email and messaging systems, improved communications and collaboration, faster response to customer queries and requests and improved accuracy and a reduction in errors.

Additionally, nearly every mobile PC shipped today is equipped with an embedded Wi-Fi capability, says market researcher In-Stat. This equates to roughly 84 million Wi-Fi enabled PCs shipped worldwide in 2006 and an expected 110 million this year.

Combined, these factors set the stage for the broad adoption of wireless solutions as a standard utility within most businesses.

802.11 Today and Tomorrow
While wireless networks are being deployed today for productivity improvements like those noted above, next-generation wireless networks will also play a pivotal role in the evolution and use of emerging applications such as high performance data solutions, voice over IP (VOIP) – which is being adopted by many companies to supplement or replace existing landline phone systems, and wireless video distribution.

Building on the advancements in the wireless industry over the last several years, the arrival of the IEEE 802.11n wireless standard is both an evolutionary and revolutionary step forward. With the growing adoption of 802.11n and its delivery of greater bandwidth and throughput, the barriers to productivity and mobility historically bounded by limited network coverage, network latency, and poor quality of service will be diminished.

802.11n-based networks are set to deliver a significant improvement in coverage (2x the coverage of an 802.11 a/b/g network) and throughput (5x the throughput of an 802.11 a/b/g network). 802.11n-based solutions will allow organizations to substantially upgrade their current first-generation network infrastructure to take advantage of a new and emerging class of network-based multimedia applications. Over time, one can expect that 802.11n-based wireless networks will ultimately become the primary WLAN infrastructure for most organizations.

Next Generation Applications Driving 802.11n Adoption
The next five years will see a rapid and sustained increased in mobile and wireless applications as companies continue to expand their mobile workforces – especially as wireless technologies like Wi-Fi provide a stronger backbone to support these systems. In fact, mobile business applications and services are expected to generate well over $100 billion on worldwide revenue by 2012, according to ABI Research. [2]

Next-Generation applications enabled by 802.11n:

Early adopters of wireless networks are already identifying key areas where the deployment next-generation applications enabled by 802.11n-based wireless networks will provide significant benefits.

For example, the higher education market has become a leading early adopter of 802.11n solutions to meet the rapid demand for campus-wide mobility. For an increasing number of schools, colleges and universities, mobility solutions provide a way to offer a wider range of academic and collaborative services to a highly diverse community of students and faculty across multi-facility, campus-wide environments.

Increasingly technology-savvy students are demanding wireless networks for educational and personal productivity. And, wireless solutions are being deployed by schools to expand academic service offerings like streaming video and video on demand and e-911 solutions to improve day-to-day campus operation and safety.

Emerging applications such as VoIP, wireless video distribution and location-based services are also driving the adoption of 802.11n networks in the healthcare market.

High speed wireless networks – designed to deliver quality of service (QoS) – are used by leading hospitals, clinics and healthcare organizations around the world to provide on-the-spot access to vital information, create collaborative links between doctors and nurses, and improve point-of-patient care activities throughout a healthcare facility.

Further, enterprise organizations of all sizes are deploying wireless LANs in record numbers to extend wired networks to workers throughout an organization and channel vital applications and data to the very center of business activity.

The faster speeds and higher reliability offered by 802.11n also become critical requirements as more companies make use of multimedia-rich applications, business-oriented social networking services, real-time collaborative team networking and Voice over WLAN.

Architected for Success

Even with the obvious cost savings and productivity gains, achieving enterprise mobility presents significant challenges for IT professionals. How do you support a growing number of wireless devices and competing standards, protect valuable resources from the growing threat of Internet viruses and worms, overcome bandwidth limitations, protect the network from unauthorized users, and integrate your WLAN into an existing wired infrastructure?

The first thing to understand in planning for a wireless network of any type is that no two deployments are completely alike. Every wireless deployment is unique and presents its own reliability and quality of service (QoS) challenges that must be identified and mitigated through the configuration of the controller, placement of APs, and structure of authentication and control procedures that impact each user within the wireless ecosystem.

Today, users of wireless networks have many architectural options to choose from including centralized or distributed Wi-Fi switch architectures or unproven coordinated control AP-only networks.

The centralized architecture adds both capital and operating costs by replicating the existing data infrastructure, requiring users to deploy high-capacity Wi-Fi switching backplanes and forcing roaming traffic to special VLANs. This approach unnecessarily increases network complexity and creates a performance bottleneck, especially at 802.11n data rates. Alternatively, the coordinated control AP approach offers high performance, but does not integrate well with the existing data network and will not scale effectively in large enterprise installations.

The choice between a centralized and a de-centralized approach is obviously critical when it comes to the performance of a wireless network today and how it will function when overall throughput is significantly boosted by higher-performance 802.11n technology and with the addition of higher-bandwidth applications. Additionally, many benefits of emerging mobility applications will be realized at the very edge of wireless networks – which today can often be hampered by slower access speeds, poor performance and less reliability.

Just as the adoption of 802.11g Access Points drove the need for centralized control (thin AP) architectures, the adoption of 802.11n will drive the need for distributed data (intelligent AP) architectures.

Taking a decentralized approach to wireless networking and having the ability to selectively shift some of the routing and control functions to intelligent APs on-demand can reduce or eliminate network latency, jitter and other network problems, and enhance the higher-bandwidth capabilities of mixed 802.11 a/b/g and 802.11n configurations.

A decentralized on-demand wireless architecture can also avoid many of the network traffic bottlenecks associated with centralized systems where all of he network traffic flows back to the controller and the entire network is potentially vulnerable to high availability issues.

Network administrators charged with supporting or developing enterprise 802.11 networks should take a hard look at channel management, application demands and usage loads when planning new wireless networks or for future systems expansion – especially when gradually introducing 802.11n equipment into the mix.

In deploying higher-bandwidth-capable systems, administrators should also consider the impact more robust technology will have the network environment (particularly with the use of less APs as edge managers), the potential problems created by signal overlap, and the flexibility of the system to adapt to changes in design and demand as network needs escalate.

With all this in mind, the most important aspect of mixed 802.11n and 802.11 a/b/g or pure 802.11n networks is flexible and user-definable control over what happens at the controller plane, within the network itself, and at the edge points, which are the final gateways to user access.

About Bluesocket

Building on the advanced features and capabilities of its distributed edge switching and intelligent access point solutions, Bluesocket's next-generation architecture unifies wireless and existing wired networks to produce a truly integrated and optimized networking solution. This approach allows customers to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying and operating large-scale Wi-Fi networks while providing wired-equivalent performance for wireless users, with seamless roaming and enterprise-class security and policy management – enabling true enterprise mobility. For more information, please visit http://www.bluesocket.com .

[1] Gartner's View of Enterprise Mobility, 16 July 2007, Leif-Olof Wallin
[2] ABI Research, Aug. 2007 http://www.abiresearch.com/abiprdisplay.jsp?pressid=896