Wired and wireless LANs: Where shall the twain meet?

By Joanie Wexler
Network World Wireless in the Enterprise Newsletter, 09/09/02

The new wireless LAN architecture announced this week by Symbol Technologies, aimed to lower wireless LAN ownership costs, brings a few questions to mind. For example, is it possible and desirable to better integrate wireless and wired network features within the enterprise?

For example, Symbol's Mobius Axon Wireless Switch, discussed last time, supports a laundry list of quality-of-service (QoS) features at both Layer 2 and Layer 3 for marking, queuing, load-balancing and filtering packets. These include IEEE 802.1Q/p, virtual LAN (VLAN), Weighted Fair Queuing and other capabilities. You might recognize these attributes as a subset of the same QoS features in your wired Ethernet switch. Symbol's Mobius wireless switch has been designed to connect to that wired Ethernet switch to centralize configuration and management of distributed access radios throughout the enterprise.

It's true that you are purchasing some redundant capabilities for your wireless population. However, by the very nature of users being mobile, different criteria must be applied to these users for QoS and security. For example, you need a different way to associate certain users with VLANs other than on a port basis, as is done in the wired world, because mobile users are using different ports all the time. Instead, the assigned user ID must be associated to the VLAN with certain access rights.

Wouldn't it be handy if a wired LAN switch vendor - perhaps Cisco, given its parallel interest in wireless LANs - were to integrate the capabilities of wired and wireless Ethernet switches? This would enable one LAN switch to simultaneously serve wired and wireless user populations and would cut down on the number of devices you'd need in your overall network infrastructure.

Gary Singh, senior director of marketing at Symbol, says Symbol built its switch with its wireless-centric capabilities because they don't exist elsewhere in the marketplace yet. He didn't seem particularly bothered by the fact that a wired Ethernet switch maker might pick up on the idea.

On the other hand, the Symbol wireless switch-plus-access port configuration is proprietary to Symbol networks. So how wireless QoS and security capabilities could get bundled into Ethernet switches for use with heterogeneous wireless LAN environments remains an outstanding question.