Wireless LANs

Wireless LAN Management 

Since the proliferation of wireless LANs during 2001-2002 inside and outside the corporate setting, management of wireless LANs has assumed great importance.  The following functions need to be addressed:

• Management of various multiple access points (AP's) in a campus environment , providing roaming and session maintenance services as users move from one AP to another 
• Tracking users, groups of users, their security and user authentication - this can be done either exclusively for wireless LANs or an extension of wireline LANs or as an extension of entire remote network configuration (enterprise network perspective)
• Providing common user interface for hot spot environments
• Asset management - type of device, device information - model, CPU, peripherals, configuration settings, application inventory, etc.
• Software updates and data synchronization
• Class of service and bandwidth allocation to different users

Issues To Consider

• Types of devices supported - Does it support only laptops?
• Single user interface?
• Hot spot support?
• Does it support multiple access points - 802.11b, 802.11a, Bluetooth and others? 
• Only wireless LAN or WLAN and wireless WAN?
• Campus only or multiple campus across a wide area network
• Does it need a proprietary hardware
• Likelihood of future compatibility to IEEE 802.11x standard, especially 802.11i standard
• One piece of software for security and another for asset management or an integrated software - kind of management suite 

Vendors and Products Addressing Wireless LAN Management

• 3e Technologies of Rockville, Md, USA - a Gateway that uses software from AirWave Wireless Inc., and turns Access Points into sniffers of rogue access points. The gateway software compares access points that should be there with the ones it actually detects. Then it flags those unwanted access points as rogues.
• BlueSocket - more than security, class of service
• iPassConect Version 2.3 - Single user interface for various environment - inside and outside corporate environment. Currently supports laptops, will support handheld PDAs (Microsoft Pocket PCs in 2003). 
• Mobile Automation's MA 2000 Suite Security Module 
• Proxim in cooperation with Ericsson - new initiative launched to address roaming between wireless LANs and wireless WANs (hot spot roaming)
• Reefedge
• Symbol's Mobius Centralized WLAN Security Management Architecture 
• ALSO see Wireless Security page - there is a lot of commonality and overlap between security products and management products  

For more info about Wireless LAN management topic, go to various vendor sites