* Motor sports sponsor wins with mesh
In the enterprise, early wireless mesh network deployments are catching on in hard-to-wire environments. The flexibility mesh affords to reconfigure a network infrastructure on the fly is an important benefit.
A wireless mesh network is providing such agility to International Speedway Corporation (ISC), which promotes more than 100 motor sports events annually, including NASCAR’s Daytona 500. The purpose of installing mesh at the company’s dozen racetracks? To accelerate transactions at mobile sales counters and to enable real-time inventory management.
Mobile trailers account for a good portion of the merchandising locations, making it difficult to install fixed-network connections for point-of-sale transactions, explains Phil Martocci, ISC project manager. “If a trailer moves, we don’t have to dig up cable. We adjust an antenna.”
A wireless mesh infrastructure is basically a network of 802.11 devices that communicate directly with one another without any cabling between them and that support the inherent best-path selection and fault-tolerant rerouting that Layer 3 routed networks enjoy.
ISC has installed Strix Access/One indoor and outdoor mesh gear in the administration buildings at its racetracks, in its merchandising tents and in its trailers, which travel from event to event loaded with souvenirs, apparel and other goods for sale. Computers in each store communicate with a store server by copper cabling; the server communicates wirelessly via the mesh network to a Strix gateway in the administration building at the track. Each track communicates via a terrestrial T-1 to ISC’s Daytona Beach, Fla., data center.
Until last February, the various merchandising venues used a mix of manual point-of-sale systems, from cash drawers to dial-up lines to cellular links, Martocci explains. Transaction times were unpredictable and, sometimes, error prone in cases where sales personnel hand-keyed prices into payment terminals.
Now the broadband capacity of the 802.11a backhaul network (54M bit/sec maximum aggregate speed operating in the 5-GHz range) has sped transaction times to less than five seconds – as fast as personnel can bag an item and hand over a credit card slip for the customer to sign, Martocci says.
He adds that this has alleviated sales losses by reducing customer wait times. Bar code scanning and credit card swipes are now used for all transactions.
From an inventory perspective, merchandise has a short shelf life, because it is marketable only for a given event. “So we wanted to know which individual stores had lots of inventory left, which had none, and to move merchandise around so we could sell as much as possible by an event’s close,” Martocci says.
To that end, store servers continually transfer inventory data to the Daytona data center. Merchandise managers on site have access to the inventory data from wireless laptops and drive around in golf carts to redeploy merchandise in real time for the most advantageous sales.
The inventory management approach is possible with the Strix Access/One equipment, because it performs double-duty as access point (accepting communications from client devices) and as backbone wireless router nodes. Other types of mesh gear function as backbone infrastructure nodes only.
Senior network engineer Michael Tanguay says ISC chose Strix equipment for a couple of reasons. First, its products supported 802.11a, and a pre-deployment scan of the 2.4-GHz 802.11b/g airwaves “indicated that they were saturated.”
In addition, the Strix architecture supports full-duplex transmissions. “There are two separate radios [involved in a transmission]. One is listening while the other is relaying a transmission to the next hop.” Not all systems he evaluated worked this way, Tanguay says.
