Comprehensive Discussion of Wireless Access Point Problems

It is still very useful to know about some wireless access points. Many people may not understand the difficulties in wireless access points. It does not matter. After reading this article, you must have gained a lot, I hope this article will teach you more things. A considerable number of WLAN vendors have recently announced the release of enterprise wireless access points based on the IEEE 802.11n standard draft. This type of Wireless Access Point provides a throughput of Mbps to Mbps in each frequency band, which is 3 to 6 times that of the current 11g and 11a networks.

Most new wireless access points are equipped with one or even two Gigabit Ethernet ports. Michael Dickson, a network analyst at the University of Massachusetts, said: "The access to our buildings is basically a hundred megabytes of bandwidth. For 11n, we will need to install a Gigabit Switch with 10-Gigabit uplink connections in the cabling room. This is not a small cost, and it is also an essential cost for 11n ." Craig Mathias, head of the Farpoint Group, said: "The 11n will stimulate the upgrade of wired infrastructure to Gigabit Ethernet ." In view of the 11n capacity, a problem related to upgrading the cable line is whether to upgrade the Ethernet wall socket: whether the wireless infrastructure can become the main means of network access.

If the existing WLAN controllers also lack the network capacity and the processing capability and memory required to handle the increased traffic, they must be replaced. This is especially true when the vendor sends all data packets from each wireless access point to the pure centralized architecture of the controller. In the past year, manufacturers have been upgrading their controllers with 11n as the starting point. Sometimes, the Data packet exchange function is also uninstalled to the access point to create a distributed Data Plane ). Mathias said: "Because of this type of distributed data plane, there is no bottleneck in the controller. If you use Meru or Extricom, You can centralize data and control the data plane. However, if you design a device to process any type of transmission stream that can be sent to it, this is not a problem ."

For 11n networks, testing wireless performance to test data such as workload and transmission flow conditions may become more important. To this end, enterprises or system integrators will use complex performance testing tools, such as products from vodwave and Azimuth Systems, which have previously been primarily used by radio chip manufacturers and equipment manufacturers. Mathias predicts: "This will be a major event in the future ." The PoE problem may surprise some users. Chris Silva, analyst at Forrester Research, said: "The PoE infrastructure limit may be tested by the 11n deployment that achieves maximum performance ."

PoE allows you to deploy a line between the switch and the Wireless Access Point instead of two lines, which may save considerable costs. However, the 11n Wireless Access Point consumes more power than the 15.4 Watt maximum power provided by power supplies based on the IEEE 802.3af standard. The new 802.3at standard that will be completed at least doubles the power. At least one vendor, Trapeze, developed to enable the 11n wireless access point that it just announced to use new code for existing PoE power supplies, but to sacrifice performance.

Phil Belanger, manager of Novarum, said: "The hope of 11n is not just faster. The longer transmission distance of the 11n will make it more practical to deploy a large system in the 5 GHz band. The 5 GHz band provides more channels than the GHz band, and has not been used much so far. This, in turn, will make it possible to build a higher-capacity WLAN. For many enterprises, a wireless network that provides hundreds of megabytes of capacity at all locations will be enough to replace wired networks ."