Stealthy wireless LAN start-up Aerohive promises new approach

A Silicon Valley start-up is about to unveil what it says will be the next generation wireless LAN, one that will sidestep the drawbacks of today’s controller-based network architecture.

Aerohive Networks plans to announce its first two products later next month. President and CEO David Flynn won’t give the game away beforehand, but in an e-mail exchange he makes clear that he thinks the time is ripe to do away with the costs and the separate management and security structures demanded by WLANs based on thin access points and controllers.

“Traditional controller-based solutions, in the process of solving the issues of [first-generation] autonomous access points, have introduced opaque overlay networks, performance bottlenecks, single points of failure, increased latency and substantially higher costs to enterprise networks,” Flynn writes.

Flynn sounds like he could be describing something that’s a generation old, when in fact it’s been barely five years since the first WLAN switches, now usually called controllers, were introduced. Controllers took over many of the functions of conventional, or thick, access points, allowing new access points to be little more than radios. Network management, authentication and security, radio frequency management, and roaming between access points and subnets were now handled by the controllers.

The performance bottlenecks cited by Flynn seem rare today, but that could change as vendors release starting this year new products based on draft 2 of the IEEE 802.11n high throughput WLAN standard. When configured to take full advantage of the multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) radio technology, 802.11n WLANs will achieve data rates around 300Mbps or even higher, compared to a maximum of 54Mbps today. Depending on the actual traffic and the capacity of the WLAN controllers and the access layer switches, there could be performance issues in some cases.

As for the Aerohive alternative, Flynn will only say that the start-up is building WLAN infrastructure gear that’s designed for cost-effective, convenient deployment, but can be scaled to support mid-market to very large enterprise WLANs.

Aerohive has advertised for engineers with experience in embedded Linux, experience in XML, SOAP, and SNMP agent; and in creating algorithms for automatically adjusting radio channels and power levels, for a range of IEEE 802 wireless technologies.

Those requirements suggest a compact Linux-based platform, implemented partly on the access point and partly in backend software that may or may not be on a dedicated Aerohive box. The use of Web services would make it possible to more easily integrate the Aerohive platform with enterprise network management, authentication and security systems.

Without going into details, the company has said the new products will be “optimized” for voice over WLANs. That will mean support for a variety of voice and QoS protocols, support for IP PBXs, and an architecture that can minimize latency and adjust to potentially large numbers of mobile IP phone users moving unpredictably around the enterprise.