The new architecture lets the airline load luggage on the plane before passengers board, and eventually will let clerks scan the bags at their destination as well. And Northwest's network engineers can manage the baggage systems remotely instead of having to upgrade or fix them on-site. "We don't have a field engineer at every airport, so in the past an engineer would spend a day or so traveling to fix a problem," says Dean Svela, senior systems engineer for Northwest. Now when a boarding-pass printer fails at the airport in Detroit, for instance, a network engineer in the corporate data center in Minneapolis can send the necessary software upgrade over the network to the printer.
The old baggage system had run on an airline-industry proprietary network that was more than 20 years old and had no remote-management capabilities. Northwest didn't want to replace its serial-based equipment when it moved the system to the LANs, at least not right away, so it installed Lantronix's MSS100 Device Servers, which convert serial-port-based devices to Ethernet.
With the old standalone serial system, if a PC lost its drive, it could disable the boarding-pass printer, too, because it was serially attached to it, Svela says. "It would take out a whole check-in position, causing much grief for our agents," Svela says. "Attaching our printer devices to the MSS100s keeps the check-in position open even if we lose a PC."
Still, curbside check-in isn't always conducive to a wired Ethernet LAN because of its outdoor location, so Northwest is exploring wireless for curbside sites. One option is to place a wireless Device Server at the curbside check-in podiums, according to Northwest officials.
Northwest also may need to up its 10-Mbps airport LANs to 100 Mbps eventually. So far, the Lantronix Device Servers are helping prevent congestion during busy times because unlike the older network -- which used the same amount of server and network resources for each transmission no matter what -- the Lantronix servers make sure the devices use only the resources they need.
"Network-traffic prioritization is a growing problem, and we are always looking for technology that helps us overcome this challenge," Svela says. "The Device Servers are one [solution that] may help us overcome any network congestion."
It wasn't easy getting the serial devices to work on the LAN at first. Northwest engineers had to reverse-engineer some serial devices to make them communicate. "We hooked up everything from the printers, scanners and 'dumb' terminals, each with slightly different characteristics and protocols that weren't meant to talk to a network," Svela says. "We had to spend some time fine-tuning the Lantronix software to get the maximum performance out of it. But it all worked out."
Meanwhile, the airport LANs have yielded a bonus service for Northwest passengers: Northwest is using the Device Servers and LAN to deliver a stock-market ticker in the terminal for its passengers.
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