Wireless LAN Distributed Monitoring Systems

Evaluation Particulars

Network Computing will be conducting a comparative review of Wireless LAN Monitoring Systems for our March 4, 2004, issue. Testing will take place in our Syracuse Real World labs.

This review will focus on the monitoring capabilities of WLAN infrastructure products. It will not provide a comprehensive comparison of all the services provided by infrastructure products. We also will be conducting a review of products focused exclusively on distributed wireless monitoring. While general comparisons will be made about the two different product classes, each review will be handled separately.

We will determine which vendors' products to test based on the following criteria:

What do we consider appropriate for this review?

This review will focus on WLAN Security.

We will address a broad range of business and technology issues related to WLAN security and provide an analysis of the many solutions and strategies available to enterprise IT professionals. Our primary goal is to educate our readers about the capabilities and limitations of infrastructure-based, real-time WLAN monitoring solutions, with specific focus on security. Although we will consider other performance, fault monitoring and configuration-management capabilities, our main focus will be on security-related monitoring capabilities.

We will be judging products based on the following criteria:

Product Requirements

This review is limited to wireless LAN infrastructure product offerings with integrated, distributed WLAN capabilities in which probes or access points collect data and report back to a central management device.