All-in-One Wireless and Wired

VoIP is the force behind a new generation of LAN switches that unite wired and wireless networks

Wireless LANs and voice over those WLANs have seen explosive growth in the last year as more businesses find the technology provides multiple benefits in convenience, cost savings and increased productivity.

According to a study by Infonetics Research, the number of organizations deploying VoWLANs will triple over the next two years, from 10 percent in the third quarter of 2005 to 31 percent in 2007. The study predicts that by 2009, 57 percent of small businesses, 62 percent of medium businesses and 72 percent of large organizations in North America will use WLANs.

According to Infonetics, this growth is being driven by the growing availability of wireless VoIP handsets and voice-enabling wireless infrastructure, and that infrastructure is in the process of change that dramatically will increase its functionality. Today, 44 percent of businesses “deploy and manage their access points separately, without the use of wireless LAN switches,” Infonetics says. The research firm sees that approach changing by 2007, “as centralized control architectures gain traction and the number of wireless LAN switch ports deployed grows significantly.”

The year 2005 marked a change point in that infrastructure. Until then, wired and wireless LAN infrastructures were deployed beside each other as separate architectures. In 2005, the first products were introduced that provide a way for wired and wireless LANs to be used and managed as one system. Not only does this approach reduce costs, but it also means the same applications can be used seamlessly across the network, both wired and wireless.

Unifying the Architecture

WLANs first developed independently of the wired infrastructure because wireless was seen as a different application, used to fill gaps in wired coverage or in very large buildings, such as warehouses, where wiring was infeasible.

Businesses maintained two parallel routing systems, one for the wireless access points and one for the wired LAN, with Layer 3 Ethernet switches.

However, the use of wireless changed in businesses from the early days. Rather than just filling gaps, wireless became the norm in some companies, deployed everywhere, often taking the place of wired infrastructure. Also, companies started to use WLANs for voice, notably in health care but also in many other businesses. As a result, the numbers of access points on networks grew exponentially — as voice often requires greater numbers of access points — to the point that wireless networks needed their own switches. A generation of products appeared, sometimes called wireless LAN appliances, that managed WLAN.

Click to Enlarge *Based on a survey of 240 respondents rating the benefits of wireless LANs on a scale of 1 (low) to 7 (high) Source: Infonetics Research

Now as wired and wireless networks are being used more in combination, a wave of new switches is coming with both Layer 2 and Layer 3 capability to support wireless and wired LANs together on one device. This new kind of infrastructure, often called “unified LANs” or “wireless LAN switches,” brings several advantages for business LANs. First is the simple cost and space advantages of deploying just one box. Having a combined wired and wireless device means less space, less power consumption and one less device to manage.

Also, having one device means a single management interface instead of two interfaces, one for the wired network and another for the wireless. Within this management system “wireless is just another piece of the overall fabric,” says Bob Schoettle, vice president of product marketing at NextHop Technologies Inc., which has developed a complete software package for manufacturers building unified LAN devices.

No Standards, No Savings

A number of early products already have appeared from vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Foundry Networks Inc. And NextHop and Flextronics Software Systems (a brand of Hughes Software Systems Ltd.) are among those making unified LAN software that will be the basis for many new devices in the coming year, responding to the growing market demand.

With these new devices come several issues because of standards, or more accurately, lack of standards. Although products are generally compliant with Internet protocols and 802.11, there are other areas lacking in standards.

For example, when the first wireless LAN appliances (also called switches) were developed to unify access points, there were many differences in how they worked with access points. “The access point contains a radio, and how it connects to wireless switch varies between wireless switch vendors,” says Mike Hong, product marketing manager of Foundry. “It is not standardized. What parts of 802.11 get processed in the access point and what in the wireless switch is different.”

Foundry’s Mike Hong

These differences are carrying over into the new unified products. Although Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality are common, encryption is another matter. Some may support different encryption methods, and there are differences in where the decryption is processed, in the access point or in the switch. Further management and security systems function differently, with some originating probes from the access point and others from the wireless switch.

A standard for the wireless functions developed by The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), lightweight access point protocol (LAPP), has not received much support from vendors at this point. “Adoption is very limited,” says Hong, “and the simple reason is because it is inadequate for what the industry is looking for now.”

As a result, users may not see one of the most important benefits of the new unified LANs: reduced cost. Today, most vendors, such as Foundry with its FastIron Edge switches, must sell their products with their own access points to ensure interoperability, something they do not want to do. “At the end of the day, people want access points to be dirt cheap, commoditized, come-from-China parts, because they put them everywhere,” says Hong. “We want to make the valuable part — the wireless switch. That is where people like Foundry expend time and effort.”

Click to Enlarge

Access points, in Hong’s view, are like Ethernet cabling: generic access infrastructure. “We want to be able to outsource them, but the industry is so fragmented that there is not a good standard for how this will work. So every wireless switch vendor has to sell access points to go with their solution.”

Hong feels that VoIP will be the force that finally drives the industry in the direction of standardization. “When an enterprise is deploying VoIP over Wi-Fi, it will have to make really dense wireless deployments to have good coverage, high availability and good quality, and the only way to do that today is a high density of access points. Then people will say they want the cost to go down.”

Products in the Pipeline

One of the most established players in the new unified LAN products, which has Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality as well a combining wired and wireless networks, is Foundry.

The company recently announced the FastIron Edge X-Series 424-Power over Ethernet switch (FES X424-POE), which can power endpoints such as VoIP handsets, video-over-IP cameras and wireless access points. The 24-port product combines 10/100/1000mbps with IEEE 802.3af PoE, redundant modular power supplies and 10-gigabit Ethernet. This product already offers unified LAN functionality as a software upgrade.

NextHop has developed software to support both wired and wireless LANs in one device. For customers looking to develop a device that combines Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching, the software is “chip-independent, operating system-independent, and ODM- (original device manufacturer) independent,” says NextHop’s Schoettle. “You pick the best chips and components, and we provide the software to tie it all together.”

NextHop also offers a variety of third-party applications that vendors may want to add to their products and has APIs to tie in those additions. So it’s an open, flexible architecture,” says Schoettle. “They can pick what they want.”

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