* Latest Wi-Fi apps require inter-vendor cooperation
As enterprises connect more systems to their wireless LANs to support additional applications, an increasingly complex integration job faces them – or, at least, their integrators.
To help ease these configuration challenges, WLAN system maker Extricom this week announced the formation of a group of ecosystem vendors that will work together to smooth out the software configuration discrepancies between their systems. The company’s Uni-Fi Alliance involves, so far, location tag maker Aeroscout, wireless VoIP handset maker Ascom and wireless intrusion detection and prevention supplier AirTight.
The group differs from the Wi-Fi Alliance, which tests and certifies basic 802.11 system component interoperability among vendors. The Wi-Fi-Certified stamp of approval indicates that one vendor’s client can successfully transmit signals to another vendor’s access point. At the application layer, however, there is a dearth of industry-standard APIs for how WLANs should talk to upstream devices such as location appliances and IP PBXs, and downstream devices such as VoIP client handsets.
As a result, integrators or enterprises need to fiddle with the various software configuration discrepancies themselves to get the disparate systems to interoperate, says Norm Dubroff, CEO at WAV, an Extricom distributor in Aurora, Ill.
The goal of the alliance, intended to expand to include IP PBX makers, fixed-mobile convergence gateway suppliers, and others, is to do some upfront legwork to reduce the necessary fiddling. The joint work will create implementation notes to help installers with the many configuration parameters and variables that must be adjusted for different types of systems to work together, says David Confalonieri, Extricom’s VP of marketing.
Extricom is a start-up whose WLAN system is built on a so-called channel-blanket architecture, rather than a cell-based architecture. The blanket architecture – conceptually similar to Meru Networks’s single-channel architecture but allowing multiple channels to be overlaid on top of one another – makes all access points look like one big AP to Wi-Fi traffic. The architecture promotes seamless mobility with no AP-to-AP handoffs (particularly meaningful to latency-sensitive VoIP), the elimination of RF cell planning and co-channel interference, and the ability to offer a performance guarantee for both connection rate and bandwidth.
