Cisco's new take on mobility

Cisco this week unveiled an architecture and supporting products to unify disparate mobile networks and clients in an enterprise.  As colleague John Cox reports, Cisco's enterprise mobility plan is to create a unified software layer that spans different physical networks and the mobile clients that use them. Mobile devices such as laptops, RFID tags, dual-mode smartphones, embedded devices and sensors could be using any combination of access networks - including wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi, passive RFID, cellular, WiMAX, Ultra Wideband, and wireless sensor networks such as Zigbee.

To bring together thiose different environments, Cisco rolled out the Mobility Services Engine (MSE), an appliance designed to collect and coordinate data about the networks and their clients, and feeding it via a XML/SOAP-based API to other applications. The MSE can use this data itself for jobs like rogue radio detection, and share it with higher-end Cisco and third-party applications for security, access control, network management, wireless asset tracking, cellular-to-Wi-Fi voice roaming, and RFID data management.

MSE is designed to offload application processing from disparate controllers to a dedicated device, creating what Cisco executives call a "services plane."  Cisco also unveiled four "services" software programs for the appliance that act as intermediaries between the network and clients, and the higher level management applications. They are:

* Context aware data: This service works with WLAN data that gives information about a particular wireless client or device, such as location, time, identity or telemetry data about physical attributes such as motion, temperature and vibration. It can process location data for as many as 18,000 Wi-Fi devices and tags.

* Mobile intelligent roaming: This handles data that lets dual-mode smartphones shift between a WLAN and a cellular network. The program makes use of signal strength and location data to measure whether a Wi-Fi signal is strengthening or fading and to fix a client's location and direction.

* Adaptive wireless IPS: This is intended to compete with dedicated wireless IPS products from vendors such as AirDefense, AirMagnet and AirTight. The program offers centralized, WLAN-wide event processing, analysis and management along with radio frequency scanning and analysis, using the Cisco Wireless Control System as its front end.

* Secure client manager: This is an administration program for 802.1x-enabled clients -- in particular for those running Cisco's Secure Services Client code -- and an intermediary to back-end systems such as Cisco Access Control Server (ACS). It manages the client's security profile and coordinates tasks such as device classification, credentials provisioning and unified client license management.

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