Over the last few years, organizations have increasingly deployed wireless local area networks (WLANs) to drive productivity, reduce cost, and improve work quality. While the return on investment has been substantial, organizations recognize they have reaped only a fraction of the potential benefits. Today, they are looking to leverage wireless technology for even greater value, by extending it to more users and by expanding the scope of wireless services and applications.

At this same time, a number of business and technology trends are creating a new set of requirements for wireless networks that can deliver the increased value that businesses are demanding. When evaluating WLAN solutions for new or expanding wireless networks, these are important requirements.

Five Requirements for Next Generation WLANs

As organizations develop their strategies for deploying new WLANs or evolving existing ones, five key requirements must guide their evaluation. The choices they make today will profoundly impact their ability to maximize value from their WLAN investments and minimize their costs throughout the life of the equipment and software.

• ‑802.11n. The IEEE 802.11n standard, which is more than ten times faster than 802.11b/g or 802.11a, is expected to be ready for enterprise deployment in the second half of 2007. Any new WLAN investments must support 802.11n when it’s available. For existing investments, the enterprise must examine whether its WLAN infrastructure will be crippled by the 10-fold increase in throughput that 802.11n will bring and whether it can move to 802.11n without exorbitant upgrade costs.

• ‑Voice over WLAN. Organizations have accelerated their adoption of voice over IP to dramatically reduce phone costs, and they are eager to extend VoIP to wireless. But voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) has had limited enterprise adoption, because current generation WLANs cannot deliver toll-quality service to large numbers of users. Next-generation WLANs must overcome this limitation to support hundreds of roaming users with clear, reliable service.

• _‑Seamless indoor and outdoor coverage. Organizations want to extend mobility services throughout their buildings and areas such as trading floors and outdoors. And they require the same, consistent enterprise feature set and security controls whether indoors or out. To get maximum functionality at the lowest cost of operation, organizations need a single wireless data/voice infrastructure that covers both domains seamlessly.

• ‑Comprehensive security. Security remains the top concern for organizations deploying WLANs. To meet their business continuity and data privacy requirements, organizations need a strong multi-layer approach, including state-of-the-art technologies for endpoint security such as Microsoft Network Access Protection (NAP) or the Trusted Computing Groups' Trusted Network Computing (TNC); advanced Wireless Protected Access (WPA2) authentication and encryption; and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliant wireless intrusion detection (WIDS) and prevention (WIPS).

• _‑Centralized management. A large WLAN may include thousands of access points (APs), tens or hundreds of switches, and tens of thousands of mobile users who need constant connectivity to their critical data and voice applications. As wireless networks continue to increase in size, and as mobility becomes pervasive, the ability to efficiently manage the WLAN becomes absolutely critical.

As organizations plan for next-generation WLAN deployments, it is critical to think about these requirements and to evaluate products with these criteria in mind, to ensure that your wireless network solution will meet your mobility needs for years to come.

Dan Simone is Chief Technical Officer at Trapeze Networks. For more information, please contact Trapeze Networks (www.trapezenetworks.com) at 877-359-8779 or via email at sales@trapezenetworks.com.