Motorola WiNGS It's Way To A New Wireless Architecture

Controller-based wireless networks might be the norm today, but Motorola is challenging the conventional wisdom of big wireless control boxes. With wireless devices spreading like weeds and the rise of 802.11n, Motorola's interesting new WiNG 5 framework just may be a sign of things to come in the WLAN market.

Remember- vendors are touting the fact that fat 802.11n wireless pipes and a boatload of new client devices (and applications) bring an order of magnitude more traffic to the network than 11a and g ever did. To bring all of this traffic back to a central controller can result in congestion and other network issues, and scaling the central controller model to branch offices can be challenging and costly.To get what WiNG 5 is all about, we need to take a quick look at other solutions in the market. A company called Aerohive Networks does intelligent 802.11n wireless without controllers. To simplify the Aerohive model- if you can eliminate the controller but keep the overall functionality that controllers provide by employing extremely capable access points, you can save serious coin on both purchasing and system operation. Aerohive is a small player in the market, and the solution's ability to scale is often questioned.

Then there are Cisco, Aruba, Bluesocket, and even Motorola itself before WiNG 5. In each vendor's solution, the APs are largely worthless without a controller, as the controller is both brain and heart of each system. And WiNG 5? Think somewhere in the middle. You may or may not need a controller with WiNG 5, and complex new magic that minimizes the vale of the controller makes for an interesting approach.

WiNG 5 is a software upgrade for existing Motorola customers, and will be rolled out with new shipping products. WiNG 5 works on existing access points and controllers, and does not introduce new hardware, only operational features. Here's where things get different: the same operating system on the controllers is on the access points with WiNG 5. Put another way, each AP can act as a controller. If that's not weird enough for you, up to 24 access points in a given environment will dynamically elect an AP to act as a controller, and the group is capable of smartly performing all of the same functions as a controller-based system. All Motorola APs can participate, including mesh nodes. So far, we're sounding a bit like Aerohove, right? Motorola's CTO Amit Sinha, and Global Product Marketing Manager Alon Lopez spent some time educating me on the rest of the WiNG 5 story.

Whether the environment is large or small, WiNG 5 deploys pretty much the same way. Whether we're talking about a large campus deployment or hundreds of branch offices, traffic optimization is the big promise of WiNG 5 by not requiring every packet to find it's way to the core. Motorola describes it as collaborative packet routing, and it feels akin to wireless mesh methods that magically know how to find the best path through a given topology, and how to sense and detour around problems.If the environment get's big enough, Motorola's controllers are still in play, sharing management duties that used to belong only to the controller with WiNG 5 APs. Under WiNG 5, central controllers work more as coordinators between the distributed intelligent APs and not as traffic aggregation. The net effect is that each controller can accommodate up to eight times as many access points than they could before, and the importance of the controller to the system as a whole is much diminished given the ability of each AP to function in the control role. Hello, lower cost of TCO.

I've always been impressed with Motorola's AirDefense Infrastructure Management and Network Assurance tools, and was happy to hear from Sinha and Lopez that WiNG 5's sophisticated AP-AP interactions can be demystified when needed for troubleshooting and support. With controller-based systems, data link paths are fairly obvious in comparison to dynamic environments like WiNG 5, so an effective single pane of glass and utilities that can expose the inner wizardry in a comprehensible way are of paramount importance- especially where the same network may be far flung across multiple sites.

WiNG 5 is early on in it's roll out, and Sinha couldn't yet discuss customers who have taken the plunge. But given Motorola's track record with wireless innovation, I would imagine that other vendors will be taking note as the Motorola customer base upgrades to WiNG 5. Controller-based wireless has been a double edged sword over the last several years, and I for one am glad to see the importance of the expensive controllers diminish while feature sets associated with them are retained.