What Is Wireless?

Not so many years ago in facil­i­ties not too far away, wire­less net­work­ing was a small deal, mainly for dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems to track prod­uct from receiv­ing to ship­ping. An access point was a stand­alone device that sat in a ceil­ing some­where, day in and day out, and helped works on a ware­house floor move prod­uct with­out being con­nected to any­thing. The access point con­nected to a hub in a wiring closet some­where within the facil­ity. The net­work was a flat sys­tem that allowed any­one to access any­thing with­out much secu­rity or user access account­ing. The only devices that could be used on this sys­tem were pro­pri­etary to what­ever man­u­fac­turer made the access point, be-it Telxon, Sym­bol or Norand. The chan­nels on these access points changed every 100 mil­lisec­onds or so if you were using Sym­bol fre­quency hop­ping equip­ment. Then Telxon brought to the mar­ket this new tech­nol­ogy, Direct Sequence Spread Spec­trum. You could now lock your equip­ment to a sin­gle chan­nel, how­ever it was still only with pro­pri­etary equipment.

In around 2000, we got the first stan­dard for wire­less 802.11b. This was great! Now, I could use devices from other man­u­fac­tur­ers with my wire­less, as long as I was not using fre­quency hop­ping equip­ment. Then the man­u­fac­tur­ers began to work together and more and more WiFi devices began spring­ing up. Next we saw Hot Spots appear at Star­bucks, uni­ver­si­ties and air­ports. But, how do we seg­ment wire­less and the rest of the wired net­work? How can I spec­ify who has access to what? I now have all of my users bring­ing in their newest Christ­mas toys, iPad2, Galaxy II, iPhone, per­sonal lap­tops. There are wire­less VoIP phones, wire­less secu­rity cam­eras, RFID tags on my most impor­tant inven­tory items, loca­tion track­ing of those items. My issues still remain: how do I con­trol access to resources on my net­work with all of these radio waves?

This out­break of wire­less devices has caused us to have to re-learn wire­less. Any­one can hang an access point in the ceil­ing but can they tie that wire­less con­troller into the exist­ing cor­po­rate net­work? How do I tie the wire­less phones back to the PBX or call con­trol sys­tem? Wire­less has now become a neces­sity in busi­ness today. Work­ers need instant access to data, ship­ping reports, email and instant mes­sag­ing. To deal with this the wire­less net­work has to be prop­erly designed to sup­port the num­ber of users in an enter­prise, com­ply with reg­u­la­tions such as PCI Com­pli­ance and still be able to pro­vide enough band­width to each user for them to be able to make a call or watch a train­ing video on their wire­less device. I can now limit what my users are able to access be lever­ag­ing VLANs and RADIUS ser­vices. I can cre­ate mul­ti­ple SSIDs to ser­vice each of my depart­ments to keep their data so HR does not get access to Account­ing. Per­sonal devices being brought to the work­place can now be con­trolled via the same secu­rity mech­a­nisms, sep­a­rate SSIDs and net­work seg­men­ta­tion. I can also now limit the band­width that I will allow the mail room to con­sume on my wire­less net­work so I can be sure that there is plenty for the exec­u­tives dur­ing The Master’s and March Mad­ness. Com­pa­nies now also pro­vide a guest net­work to out­side ven­dors or aduitors. The inter­nal net­work must be secured against this net­work. How do I accom­plish all of this and not suf­fer from inter­fer­ence from my neigh­bors in my office build­ing or that air­port down the street? This is all accom­plished with the new breed of wire­less tech­nolo­gies.

Wire­less is no longer just an access point in the ceil­ing that is help­ing to get some work­ers on the dis­tri­b­u­tion floor impor­tant data. It has become a neces­sity in the busi­ness place and in our every­day lives. Just think what your life would be like with­out your smart­phone or iPad. That is the real­ity that is now faced with today’s wire­less net­works and the chal­lenges that are being faced by net­work­ing groups through­out the indus­try and espe­cially wire­less engi­neers.