Using a wireless switching network structure to reduce enterprise network costs (1)

The establishment of wireless networks is relatively costly for an enterprise. Especially in security protection measures, it requires a lot of manpower and financial resources for maintenance. Therefore, in the construction process, it is necessary to allocate and manage effectively to reduce the cost budget. Next we will introduce the questions about the wireless switching network and see how this network structure can effectively allocate resources.

As enterprises rely more and more on wireless technology to provide key task applications, network administrators must decide how to allocate wireless access bandwidth to avoid reducing network efficiency or causing budget shortage.

The initial deployment of enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) provides at most a small amount of bandwidth, and the security is not high, which hinders the use of wireless technology in enterprises. In this way, the wireless LAN has been confined to a small part of key application services. In this case, IT professionals have been using an overlapping architecture to quickly port a wireless LAN to an existing wired network. In this architecture, all the information flows in the wireless LAN are transmitted to a central Access Controller in a tunnel mode, where they are unblocked and verified, and then enter the wired network (figure 1 ).

Figure 1: Traditional roundabout transmission network. In the figure, arrows are used to indicate the flow from a switch to the network core (marked as the switch trunk), and then the wireless traffic to a nearby switch node is returned.

Although 802.11n improves wireless performance, it is plagued by network bottlenecks due to the low efficiency of overlapping architectures. In addition, in an overlapping architecture, the wireless part is a special service running on the network, rather than an essential internal function in the network, which leads to inefficiency. As a result, wireless networks cannot be expanded economically and cost-effectively when the wireless business user base is expanded. Network administrators planning to switch to 802.11n need to figure out all the benefits of Wireless Access and determine whether a new network architecture is required. This article discusses the necessity of adopting a new architecture, introduces a new basic component, that is, unified wireless/wired switching, and describes the features and benefits of the solution based on this new component.