The increasing number of clients (and their increasing volumes of all kinds of traffic) in any given physical area are driving a renewed interest in WLAN dense deployments. Meru's 500-client demo gives us an excellent opportunity to explore this important direction in more detail.
I’ve been an advocate of the dense-deployment philosophy since I wrote my first White Paper on the topic back in 2004. The idea is simple – ignore the traditional site-survey process, deploy APs with capacity rather than coverage alone in mind, use existing wiring for AP interconnect and backhaul wherever possible (to minimize installation expense), and maintain capacity as user demands (traffic loads, especially of time-bounded voice and video, in addition to the ever-increasing sheer numbers of client devices) grow. There were a lot of skeptics back in 2004, but I continually run across large enterprise-class venues where deploying an AP to cover only 1,000 square feet or so is the norm. A lot of advantages derive from maintaining a minimal distance between client and infrastructure, and keep in mind that overprovisioning has always been a key strategy in the wired world. The constraints of wireless demand a little more planning and operational finesse, sure, but this isn’t that hard if the WLAN system vendors provide a little help in these areas.
So it was great to receive an invitation from Meru Networks to come explore their 500- (actually 531-) client demo they have running at their headquarters. This is the densest deployment I’ve ever seen – the entire demo exists in about 500 square feet, and uses eight Wi-Fi channels in total. The idea was to experiment with handling large numbers of clients, load balancing, and mobility under realistic operating conditions – including interference from nearby networks. Note that this testbed isn’t quite a full benchmarking lab at this time, but we did run some simple performance tests with excellent results, even for voice and video. You can read the details in our latest White Paper on the subject, which explores Meru’s demo in depth and also spends a good deal of time on why I continue to believe that dense deployments are so important – including a couple of very interesting real-world examples. Keep your eye on this one – Meru is on to something here. 500 clients might seem exotic today, but follow the trends and you’ll see that deployments of this form are likely to become quite common over the next few years.
Like many of you, we’re powering down for the Thanksgiving holiday. Yes, it’s been another challenging year no matter what business you’re in, but we all regardless have much to be thankful for. I am especially thankful that all of my family will be here starting Wednesday, so that’s it for this week. I wish everyone a great holiday!
