Wi-Fi tools gain sophistication

Recent announcements target tricky 802.11n deployments

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

802.11n is poised to pervade the interior of enterprise buildings. In anticipation, new tools have been emerging to help enterprises plan, manage and secure these high-speed wireless networks, which have some eccentricities.

There has been a spate of recent developments:

* Simulating and predicting 802.11n performance.
AP placement in Greenfield 11n deployments and mixed 802.11a/b/g/n environments is trickier than traditional WLAN planning in part because multipath signal propagation causes coverage spikes that, when overlapped, can leave little holes in coverage area – unlike the typical, more predictable overlapping circles of coverage designed in traditional Wi-Fi environments.

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802.11n is poised to pervade the interior of enterprise buildings. In anticipation, new tools have been emerging to help enterprises plan, manage and secure these high-speed wireless networks, which have some eccentricities.

There has been a spate of recent developments:

* Simulating and predicting 802.11n performance.
AP placement in Greenfield 11n deployments and mixed 802.11a/b/g/n environments is trickier than traditional WLAN planning in part because multipath signal propagation causes coverage spikes that, when overlapped, can leave little holes in coverage area – unlike the typical, more predictable overlapping circles of coverage designed in traditional Wi-Fi environments.

To help WLAN administrators figure out where to place 11n access points (AP) to gain a minimum throughput across a desired coverage range, Motorola next month is scheduled to ship 11n LANPlanner, a suite of tools for simulating 11n performance under a given building’s environmental conditions. The capabilities are similar to the sophisticated 11n site survey and modeling tools in Trapeze Networks’ RingMaster Version 7.0 Wireless Management Tool Suite, launched in April.

Both products allow WLAN planners to load CAD drawings into their systems; specify building construction materials; input their desired throughput, coverage range and signal strength; and get a plan for the number of APs to install and where to place them for optimal deployment.

* 802.11n intrusion detection and prevention.
Wi-Fi monitoring company AirTight last month enhanced its software to support comprehensive security for 802.11n threats. The company could previously detect 802.11n rogue devices — unauthorized 11n devices connected to a corporate network — when they operated in backward-compatibility mode, explains VP of product management Sri Sundaralingam. Among these were consumer-class 802.11a/b/g/n APs and PCMCIA client cards.

Now, with Version 5.7 of AirTight’s monitoring software, “We have visibility into all 11n devices, including 40MHz operation,” Sundaralingam says. This includes disallowing potential honeypot client connections to unauthorized APs, whether they are “good faith” neighbors in the company next door or malicious APs spoofing the company’s SSID and/or MAC address, he says.

* Virtualization.
Start-up Aerohive this month is slated to ship virtual, partitioned WLAN management capabilities with the next release of its HiveManager software. It allows enterprises (or service providers that want to get into the managed WLAN service business) to create up to 50 separate virtual HiveManager instances from a single network management system (NMS). Personnel can separately manage different WLANs in different business units or different geographic locations. Service providers would be able to manage separate customer WLANs from a single NMS, says Stephen Phillip, senior director of marketing.

Also on the virtualization front: Trapeze Networks Ringmaster 7.0, mentioned earlier, allows its customers to cluster and virtualize the company’s WLAN controllers. The capability allows for automatic, stateful failover to eliminate controller single points of failure and to achieve what the company calls “nonstop wireless” availability.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.