Aruba Networks is making a big marketing push stressing the value of multimedia capabilities on enterprise WLANs. But this isn't just marketing - supporting large volumes of time-bounded traffic is about to become a key requirement in many venues.
The term multimedia first appeared with the advent of sound cards and CD-ROM drives on PCs back in the early 1990s, but it’s broadly applied today to define the inclusion of all media, including time-bounded traffic like voice and video, within IT, and thus on networks, and thus on wireless LANs. We’ve developed all kinds of techniques (most notably overprovisioning) as well as new network protocols to smooth the processing of multimedia data, but, of course, wireless embodies all kinds of additional interesting challenges, the most important here being the fundamentally-statistical nature of the air itself, along with the limited capacity all too often provisioned on enterprise WLANs. Headroom matters; retries not so much.
But it turns out there is a lot more that the vendors can do to enhance multimedia performance on their products. I recently spent some time with WLAN heavyweight Aruba Networks to discuss their multimedia initiatives, and, while there, I had the opportunity to run a few simple tests to explore multimedia requirements in more detail and to see how innovations in WLAN system architecture can be applied to making enterprise WLANs what Aruba calls Multimedia-Grade.
My testing at Aruba involved a few simple experiments evaluating some of their latest innovations, including application prioritization and airtime fairness, as well as trying out their new spectral analysis and remediation capabilities, which worked flawlessly. I also examined the impact of multiple SSIDs, frequently used to implement the multiple classes of service required for multimedia, and discovered that a surprisingly large amount of capacity-stealing overhead can be present using this technique. Anyway, you can read the details in our latest Technical Note on this subject.
Regardless, increased use of video and especially voice on enterprise WLANs dictates a proactive stance when planning that next set of upgrades or a new deployment. It would be shortsighted at this point, I think, not to consider voice and video services as mission-critical on enterprise WLAN infrastructure. Demand is increasing, a cost/benefit case can be made, and, as I saw at Aruba, the vendors are hard at work (or at least they should be!) enhancing their offerings to meet this requirement.
