HP unleashes wireless network traffic monitoring

HP this week claimed to be the first to implement a technology designed to improve traffic monitoring in wireless networks.

HP’s ProCurve Networking enterprise LAN switching business said it has incorporated sFlow technology into its Wireless Edge Services xl Module for its switches. HP just announced this module. 

SFlow is an IETF specification – RFC 3176 -- that uses packet-based traffic sampling to provide network-wide visibility. It is intended to improve insight into network traffic both in wired and wireless environments, allowing customer to quickly respond to security threats, and scale to large network deployments.

Though HP may be the first to implement sFlow for wireless traffic monitoring, it is not the first to implement it for wireline. Extreme, Foundry and even HP began plugging sFlow into their switches three years ago.

HP ProCurve and InMon Corporation jointly developed the wireless extensions for sFlow.

Customers will be able to use wireless sFlow to assist in wireless deployment, troubleshooting wireless signal or performance issues, as well as gaining visibility into network traffic such as top talkers, top applications and connections, HP said.