Starting the future deployment of 802.11ac from the perspective of the overall architecture (1)

802.11ac is one of the most important wireless technologies in the next two to three years. It can provide up to 1/6 Gbps data transmission capabilities and reduce the power consumption of devices to in the 11n era. As more and more manufacturers join the support queue of 802.11ac and launch corresponding products, 802.11ac is gradually being promoted in the home market. As enterprises focus on wireless access and BYOD, 802.11ac will also enter the enterprise market...

What WLAN challenges can 802.11ac address for enterprises? Is 11n useful? How long will it take for enterprises to enter the 802.11ac Gigabit wifi age? What preparations should be made in advance? BKJIA interview with Aruba experts to sort out the technical principles of 802.11ac and answer these questions.

802.11ac enhances throughput and capacity, but the network management and control technology is not keeping up

With the development of enterprise BYOD, the demand for devices and applications is increasing, including the need for users to connect to their own personal devices, IT managers must ensure that their network infrastructure provides top-notch performance and quality for business applications. 802.11ac uses Mu-MIMO and beam forming technologies to provide enhanced throughput and capacity to meet the needs of enterprise applications.

Aruba technical experts said that although 802.11ac has improved speed, performance, capacity, energy consumption, and other aspects, the network management and control technology has not been able to keep up with each other, in addition, the failure rate of large-scale WLAN services is on the rise for both enterprise applications and telecom operators.

Robert, product director of Aruba network company, said: "The speed has improved when 802.11ac was announced, but without intelligence, many advantages will not be seen, in addition, customers cannot see how much capacity has been increased." How to solve the conflict between WLAN speed improvement and network backend-to-front-end management and control technology has become one of the most important issues for enterprises. For enterprise customers, they are more concerned with how to ensure the reliability of access in the case of high density, better understand the location of devices, and better obtain device information, to achieve better security management. To achieve these benefits, Aruba has released the ClientMatch technology to better achieve the advantages of 802.11ac speed.

11n and 11ac will be "tiered"

Although the 802.11ac standard is designed to provide a higher speed and capacity than the 802.11n network, it does not propose methods to optimize device and client access to Wi-Fi networks, therefore, the network performance based on the 802.11ac standard is not significantly different from that of the 802.11n network.

Xu Yong, president of Aruba China, said: "From 802. 11n to 802.11ac has been developing for more than two years. According to the current standards, 802.11ac will also be delayed, and will be officially confirmed in the second half of 2013, the degree to which 802.11n is saturated is also a problem. The degree of saturation of 802.11n varies depending on the region development. Therefore, for a long period of time, 802.11n and 802.11ac should coexist." Xu Yong said. Obviously, the development of 802.11n and 802.11ac is application-driven and there will be no alternative development. In the future, the development of 802.11ac will be "tiered.