Video on wireless LANs heats up
You’re going to be hearing a lot about video on wireless LANs this year. I’ve been sending relatively low-bit-rate (3 Mbps) video around my house for a long time, with satisfactory results on the small (monitor) screen and acceptable results on the big (projector) screen – the latter over two wireless hops, by the way. Cisco, in a somewhat veiled press release, has extended the functionality of their enterprise-class WLAN products to support streaming video on a grander scale. Cisco calls the new capability VideoStream, and it’s centered on multicast-to-unicast conversion in the AP, as opposed to the controller, thus minimizing over-the-network traffic and extending the solution to wired networks as well.
Now, it’s not so much that Cisco has added video support to their WLAN products; their competitors are doing so as well. But rather it’s the recognition, by the industry leader, that large-scale deployment of video on enterprise networks is a key trend. Video is really important – while it’s the worst of all worlds in terms of network demand (time-boundedness and large data objects), it’s the richest and most powerful communications vehicle ever developed. 802.11n is only the first step in providing the capacity (note it’s not really a question of raw throughput) required to support it on wireless LANs – it’s additional traffic-management innovations that will really make the difference. Make no mistake – video is going to become as common as text or static images, and networks (not just radios) designed from this point forward must be able to handle video without breathing too hard.
I spent a good part of last month testing the video performance of a new WLAN chipset implementation, and I’ll have more for you on that shortly. I’ll also review the status of the major consortium efforts in WLAN video as well. And I’m working on another WLAN video project that I may be able to talk about later this year. But, in the meantime, like I said, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about video this year, and I strongly recommend that new WLAN deployments be undertaken with the requirements of video distribution in mind.
