Cooperative Control: Part 1 February 15, 2010
Posted by Devin Akin in : Uncategorized , trackbackIntroduction
The first generation of WLANs were autonomous (standalone) access points and were relatively simple to deploy, but they lacked the manageability, mobility, and security features that enterprises required, even for convenience networks. Then centralized, controller-based architectures emerged to address these issues and others such as fast/secure roaming for mobile devices, radio resource management (RRM), and per-user or per-device security policies. Unfortunately, they also introduced opaque overlay networks, performance bottlenecks, single points of failure, increased latency, and substantially higher costs to enterprise networks. As Wi-Fi is increasingly embraced as a critical part of the enterprise network and enterprises deploy demanding applications (e.g. voice and video) over an extremely high-speed Wi-Fi infrastructure, the consequences of this movement are magnified and are leading the industry to reexamine the validity of today’s centralized WLAN architecture.
Aerohive Networks has responded by pioneering a new WLAN architecture called the Cooperative Control architecture. It is a controller-less architecture that eliminates the downsides of controllers while providing the management, mobility, scalability, resiliency, and security that enterprises require in their wireless infrastructure.
Cooperative Control® Architecture
Aerohive Networks has developed an innovative new class of wireless infrastructure equipment called a Cooperative Control Access Point (CC-AP). A CC-AP combines an enterprise-class access point with a suite of cooperative control protocols and functions to provide all of the benefits of a controller-based WLAN solution, but without requiring a controller or an overlay network. Aerohive Networks’ implementation of a CC-AP is called a HiveAP. This cooperative control functionality enables multiple HiveAPs to be organized into groups, called “Hives,” that share control information between HiveAPs and enable functions like fast/secure layer 2/3 roaming, coordinated radio channel and power management, security, quality-of-service (QoS), and native mesh networking. This information sharing capability enables a next generation WLAN architecture – the cooperative control architecture – that provides all of the benefits of a controller-based architecture, but is easier to deploy and expand, lower cost, more reliable, more scalable, more ubiquitously deployable, higher performing, and more suitable for demanding applications such as voice and video than controller-based architectures.
The diagram that follows outlines the building blocks of the cooperative control architecture. It is implemented using two types of products.
- Cooperative Control Access Points (HiveAPs) that have dual radios that support simultaneous use of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrums for wireless access and/or wireless mesh connectivity. HiveAPs implement robust security such as: WPA/WPA2-Enterprise, WPA/WPA2-Person, de facto standards such as Opportunistic Key Caching, Private PSK, integrated WIPS, stateful firewall policies, and L2-L4 denial-of-service (DoS) prevention. Each HiveAP’s SLA capabilities are based on advanced QoS policies, Dynamic Airtime Scheduling, and Airtime Boosting capabilities using an easily-configured management application. A single radio HiveAP is also available.
- A central management platform (HiveManager) that provides centralized user policy management and simplified HiveAP configuration, firmware updates, monitoring, and troubleshooting. HiveManager is available in many flavors, including 1U and 2U appliances, a virtual appliance (virtual machine), and a SaaS delivery option called HiveManager Online.
The architecture is supported by three distinct, but tightly-interrelated technology building blocks:
- Cooperative control: a set of control-plane protocols that provides dynamic layer 2 (MAC-based) routing, automatic radio channel and power selection, and fast/secure roaming without requiring controllers.
- Policy enforcement at the edge: the ability to enforce granular, user-based QoS, security, and access policies at the edge of the network where the user connects.
- Best-path forwarding: scalable wired/wireless mesh routing protocols allow traffic to be securely forwarded via the highest performance and most available path in the network. This includes both the ability to fail back when failed links are reestablished and to dynamically transition access radios into mesh backhaul mode as policy dictates.
Diagram 1. Building Blocks of
Cooperative Control Architecture
Comments»
No frills and to the point.Like it. Look forward to Part II.
Thanks Devin – now we’re waiting for the next part in the series.