Slashdot Mirror
Cisco To Unveil Wireless Mesh Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "CRN is reporting that Cisco will enter the wireless mesh networking fray next week. Since aquiring Airespace Cisco has been working hard to bring their own mesh technology to fruition. The new solution will target businesses who wish to move the traditional Wi-Fi network outside and possibly cover large regions."
Wont there at some point become a serious issue of collisions, noise, and the like if everyone decides to make their own "wireless mesh network"?
I attended a future of wireless conference in Madison, WI a few weeks ago, they had a keynote speaker from Cisco who talked about this very technology. The things its hardware can do is impressive. And yes, a lot of it could (and is) taken care of via software. These mesh nodes can detect other nodes and alther their signal strength to improve coverage. They can adapt to cover for another node that has gone down. They can immediatly detect unauthorized access points and alert NetAdmins of a potential security issue. These systems are self contained, you don't need to wire each one to the network, they just need juice except for the gateway which can run off of power over ethernet. No expencive wire pulling. No manual configuration. Just plug it in and go.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I'm all for wireless mesh network competition, but do any of you think this could help bring the cost down? I recently had some involvement in a public safety wireless deployment project. As much as I wanted to see mesh happen, it was just simply cost prohibitive. Prices ranged from $75,000 to $150,000 per square mile. And while other solutions are out there, it's hard to get a good signal in rough terrian. The final solution? Private RF with a blazing 33Kbps connection!
Of course, the other direction works as well: cell networks providing faster access. Unfortunately, most cell providers seem (to me) to be shooting themselves in the foot, charging far too high of prices for data access. IMO, they'd be better off trying to maximize market share in this segment by selling the service at near break-even pricing. I did a bit of math a while back, and figured that at least from one provider, each bit of "data" cost something like 5 times as much to transmit as each bit of "voice" -- strange, at least IMO.
--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
We have multiple large warehouses with truck mounted and handheld Symbol wireless devices and each warehouse has 10 or more access points. One issue we have at times is with roaming. The current Symbol software has a bug and will not let go of an access point as readily as it should causing obvious connection issues. Does anyone know if this will address the issue as a possible work around? I will be interested in seeing if Cisco's 1200 series can also be used in conjunction with this new access point to create a mesh since we have rolled out a large number of them very recently to replace the nasty old 350s.
For I am Cletus.The.Wonder.Sloth IPv6.5
Well, I would have to disagree with you on that. Look around you, note how many stupid people you can find in a 100yd radius! (Heck, look at half the posters on /. including me).
This is really cool. Now it becomes almost trivally easy for people to resell internet access and break the backs of the monopolies of cable and DSL internet access providers. And if this were combined with satelite downlink, everybody could have some seriously fast access for a minimal cost. Bring it on!
Best regards.
it seems to me that WiFi plus some nice software should make a mesh. Doesn't seem like a hardware thing to me.
Doesn't have to be a hardware thing, but when you're Cisco, everything should be solved with hardware.
Help the CUWiN Project, it's distributed under the BSD license.
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network
(Disclaimer: I'm a contributer to said project)
I find this announcement from Cisco quite puzzelling. It's not really a mesh - more of a star. A true mesh means that each node can talk to many other nodes. In Cisco's proposed solution they have a central node attaching (via 802.11a) to remote nodes in what seems like a star configuration.
In a true mesh topology only one node requires a wired connection, and the traffic can be routed through nodes which attach to this node to nodes further away. If I understand Cisco's idea of a "mesh" the end nodes (the ones in the street lights) etc cannot route anything to any other nodes.
Now the interesting thing is that people have been building mesh networks for a few years now. They take the very inexpensive WRTG54G, and put a linux image on it. From that point on it's a matter of using open source software (available in various shapes and forms) to make this very inexpensive box into a true mesh node.
I think another point which is being lost here is that people (including municipalities) want to roll these things out at low cost. Because nobody wants to pay huge money to access them, and the coverage of an individual node is so small, the cost per access point must be low, and I mean REALLY low (like under $100). Cisco will never provide a solution for these costs - that's just not how they work.
So in the Cisco solution we have to also have a tower, so we can blast out 802.11a signal to all the nodes - also not very desirable. What if we want to cover a few streets and don't have proper line of sight? Suddenly it means multiple towers and escalating costs. A true mesh network hands the signal between adjacent nodes so line of sight isn't always needed to cover an area.
There are people out there rolling out working mesh networks right now, yet we are reading how there is big demand for this "new" technology. Please... Or am I missing something here?
The only problem I see with the existing solutions based on the WRTG54G is that it isn't an outdoor device. What we need is for someone to design a little box with very lower power consumption that can handle outdoor environments, and still keep it as low cost...
Just my two cents' worth.
"The Cisco solution is based on its proprietary Adaptive Wireless Path Protocol, a mesh routing technology designed to allow the wireless network to self-configure, self-optimize, resist interference and network downtime, and reduce network deployment costs"
...
"The Aironet 1500 is priced at $3,999. A kit with an Aironet 1500 access point and equipment for pole-top mounting will sell for $4,645, and a 1500 with a rooftop mounting kit will sell for $4,815, according to the documents."
So much for the 'reducing deployment costs' part...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Mesh networking is nothing like cellular networks. In mesh networks each node participates in the routing process, relaying packets intended for other receivers. Of course this is not the case with traditional cellular networks where routing takes place only in the based stations and the core network connecting the base stations. Furthermore, mesh (also called ad-hoc) networks are self-configurable and self-healing. You throw the nodes over an area and they themselves discover who their neighbors are, discover routes to other nodes in the network using distributed on demand or proactive routing protocols, and if a link fails they can automatically reconfigure their routing tables. Since nodes relay packets destined to other nodes, the range of the covered area can increase with the number of appropriately located devices, unlike cellular networks where the range is solely determined by the base station (BS) and phones' antenna transmission range. There is virtually no single point of failure as is the BS for traditional cell networks. Issues like hand-over are usually handled by the mesh network gateways. The defining steps on the subject were done by researchers at UC berkeley and xbow http://www.xbow.com/Products/Wireless_Sensor_Netwo rks.htm.
Another pioneering company in the field of mesh networking is Embernet www.embernet.com, these guys developed commercial h/w and s/w for this purpose more than 3 years ago.
There are people out there rolling out working mesh networks right now, yet we are reading how there is big demand for this "new" technology. Please... Or am I missing something here?
That's why I've been plugging the CU Wireless Network. It is a self organizing mesh that is open source (BSD License). It is one of the first networks to use the HSLS (Hazy Sighted Link State) algorithm.
Actually it really is a mesh. The "controller" is just for management traffic. All Cisco AP's can now use LWAPP, which let's the AP's get all it's management, configurations and control traffic from a centralized device. This means all security configs, polity configs, etc.. are pre-defined on a controller. No pre-configuring each AP before deployment; you just plug in an AP like you would a light bulb and it works.
On the data plane side, they truly are mesh and can talk to any other device in that mesh.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
"traditional Wi-Fi network"
It's words like these that show us just how fast technology is being developed.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Nokia did the same thing a few years ago when they acquired RoofTop Communications. They rolled out the mesh technology to ISPs. After about 10-15 nodes and 2-3 hops away from the master node (or "airhead") the performance was about that of single channel ISDN. It was sold as 1 MBit to each subscriber node. The meshing worked nice. But the speed was pathetic. Then Nokia dumped the entire line without warning and left ISPs high and dry. Many of which I believe went to Motorola's Canopy platform.
Having messed with current mesh systems (WDS), I'm not very satisfied. The problem that you find is that the radio can only recieve or send at any given moment. Wi-Fi is half-duplex. The effect of this is that every hop you have, you are cutting your available bandwidth by 1/2. Also, reliability goes down the toilet and you add the problem of dumb repeaters circulating packets like highschoolers passing a joint around behind the gym.
If you were to have a mesh network using up TWO wireless channels, each AP having two radios, you could break this bottleneck and have a fake-full-duplex network, meaning you'd basically just tack on a few ms of latency for each hop. Problem solved, no ground-breaking research needed. The problem with it? They would never make a dual-radio WRT54G, so I'd have to pay a bloated price (Probably 4x the price of a single-radio AP) due to economies of scale and such.
One way I made a fake mesh (Which was really more of a star but without so much bandwith cut) was to have a backhaul channel of 14(illegal) and just have a central AP on that chan. On the remote router end, I'd have a client on chan 14, and then an actual AP for the public connected to it by CAT5. Hey, it's rigged.. but it works.