* Do you want different radio, mgmt vendors?
By now, you might have heard rumblings about an emerging wireless protocol called the Lightweight Access Point Protocol, or LWAPP. On July 18, members at an IETF meeting voted to create a formal working group to create this standard.
Bottom line, this protocol is meant to provide a common way for wireless management controllers, a.k.a. “wireless LAN switches,” to communicate with any vendor’s radio infrastructure. Put another way, eventually, radios and their management systems will be decoupled, leaving you with the flexibility to choose your radios from one vendor and your wireless configuration/security/management/monitoring system from another.
The standard will not specify management features and applications per se; that’s where the vendors intend to innovate and differentiate. Rather, the spec will describe a common way for the two network elements to communicate. This effort has emerged, in part, because the thin access point (AP)/wireless switch architecture (which moves some, if not all, smarts from the infrastructure radios into a centralized controller) didn’t exist at the time that 802.11 standards were created. Similarly, several of the functions (such as SNMP and DHCP) specified in LWAPP encroach on the Layer 3 services area; thus, the involvement of the IETF rather than the IEEE.
The motivation of the vendors backing this effort (such as Airespace, DoCoMo USA Labs and Legra Systems) is obvious. Once any vendor’s APs can be configured and managed by any other vendor’s switches/controllers, vendors that don’t get selected on the merits of their APs still have a chance to sell their bread-and-butter RF management/monitoring solutions and tools to those same customers.
The LWAPP protocol is specific to the 802.11 wireless LAN space; however, a superset of the effort dubbed the Control and Access Provisioning of Wireless Access Points can be applied in any wireless network, say those involved in the effort. These include, for example, short-range, high-speed ultrawideband wireless networks and the emerging 802.16a and 802.16e standards for fixed and mobile metro-area wireless networking.
