Mountain Resort Town Upgrades Muni Mesh for ''Peak''
Performance.
Third-Generation Wireless Mesh Offers Welcome Replacement in Multi-Hop
Environment. New Features Announced
"One might not expect a resort town high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains to be a municipality that would require an upgrade to the latest generation of wireless mesh networking, but performance is extremely important to our community," said Keith Hall, President of Enchanted Circle Communications, LLC. "We had deployed a second-generation wireless mesh product, but the performance wasn't adequate over multiple hops. We couldn't afford to dig trenches or string new aerial cables to provide better performance through more wired connections, so we went looking for an alternative that would work for our customers."
Hall's customers are the owners and guests of Red River, a beautiful resort town, nestled in a long valley at over 8600 feet in elevation. "Although our guests primarily come to enjoy skiing in the winter and hunting, fishing, hiking and camping the rest of the year, they still want their Internet access," noted Hall. "Since our population swells to over 15,000 during peak periods, we need plenty of networking capacity to satisfy their performance expectations. But because the permanent population is much smaller, the cost of wired connections to each property is prohibitive."
Third-generation MeshDynamics solution provides high performance over multiple hops
"With Wi-Fi meshes poised to cover essentially every major metropolitan area everywhere over the next decade, a key question facing decision makers is how to provision enough capacity for the long term," said Craig Mathias, a principal with the wireless and mobile advisory firm Farpoint Group (Ashland, MA). "Capacity is vital as these networks take on roles ranging from municipal IT to monitoring, control, telemetry, voice and multimedia, and, of course, consumer and business applications. This state of affairs demands an architecture that embodies both multiple radios per node and advanced routing protocols -- the two keys to success."
Red River selected MeshDynamics' MD4000 family of Structured MeshTM wireless nodes as a replacement for the earlier-generation wireless mesh solution. Red River is long and narrow with the wired Internet connection located near the extreme southeast end of town which requires six hops to reach the other end of town. The existing wireless mesh product could not provide adequate performance over this many hops at busy periods.
Because the MD4000 only adds 1 millisecond of delay per hop and offers more consistent bandwidth over the network, Enchanted Circle Communications is able to provide the same service levels anywhere in the city. In addition, a viewer-controlled surveillance camera is installed at the MD4000 node two hops from the wired connection so that skiers are able to check ski conditions from their cabin. Permanent residents, merchants, and visitors may access the network with their own 802.11b client devices such as laptops and PDAs. Backhaul (node-to-node) connections are via 802.11a for highest performance and channel flexibility. Omni-directional antennas were used for both 802.11b service and 802.11a backhaul to ease installation.
"Wireless mesh was the only viable solution for our network," said Hall, "but the performance of the first wireless mesh product we tried was so disappointing, we almost gave up. MeshDynamics products have done well in our mountain climate, both winter and summer, and the installation was very straightforward. It's been a boost to our ISP revenue and makes our resort more attractive to visitors and potential owners."
New security and performance features announced
MeshDynamics, Inc. the leader in third-generation wireless mesh products for high performance data, video, and voice applications, also announced new features in its MD4000 family of Structured Mesh(TM) wireless nodes to bolster security and fine-tune performance in demanding outdoor 802.11 WiFi networks. The two features include support for IEEE 802.11e Class-of-Service and expanded WiFi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) security. The combination of these two features allows network providers to offer different service types securely on a single wireless mesh infrastructure.
Supporting high-priority traffic in a mixed environment requires 802.11e and third-generation mesh
As municipalities move beyond the first wave of trials and to actual deployment, it is becoming necessary to provide a differentiation of services to different types of users. For example, a municipality might want to offer a low-performance solution as free metro access, while making it possible for a commercial Wireless Internet Service provider to also offer a for-fee higher-performance service by leasing capacity on the same wireless infrastructure. In addition, government and public safety agencies may desire wireless 802.11 communications in an area. Until now, the difficulty has been that earlier-generation wireless mesh products were limited by the contention inherent in 802.11 networks. Low-bit-rate devices may lock out other users for long periods of time, higher densities of users may cause congestion when many stations transmit at once, and there is no notion of levels of service in the basic 802.11 specification, as might be needed for critical communications or voice and video communications.
MeshDynamics provides the four Classes-of-Service defined by the 802.11e standard, but goes beyond basic implementation of the standard in providing capabilities to "throttle back" lower priority users.
"It's like cars on a multi-lane freeway," said Francis daCosta, founder and CTO of MeshDynamics. "It's not enough simply to have different lanes. For example, when an emergency vehicle needs access on the Freeway, its lights and siren move other traffic to the shoulder. We can do the same thing with higher priority traffic. This is only possible by combining 802.11e with our third-generation backhaul capabilities that provide consistent high performance with low delay and jitter."
MeshDynamics combines 802.11e Class-of-Service capabilities with the ability to provision separate Virtual LANs (vLANs) and SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers) to offer the maximum in performance tuning and security throughout the network. These features allow network providers to serve a variety of different constituents on the same wireless mesh infrastructure.
Enhanced security for critical networks
Early WiFi products lacked robust security. Intended for an indoor environment, some security measures (such as WEP -- the Wired Equivalent Privacy) could be easily "cracked" by a malicious snooper. In response, the WiFi Alliance introduced WiFi Protected Access (WPA) as a standards-based interoperable WiFi security specification, supplementing a variety of proprietary solutions. WPA used Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) for data encryption.
WiFi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) is the second generation of WPA security. WPA2 is based on the IEEE 802.11i amendment to the 802.11 standard. WPA2 goes well beyond WPA by using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for data encryption. This degree of data security is key for enterprise and government deployment of 802.11 wireless mesh in outdoor environments. MeshDynamics now supports WEP, WPA, and WPA 2 with AES on all of its products.
"Although we developed it first for a military customer, WPA2 is being used wherever data security is critical," notes daCosta. "A number of our recent installations are in homeland security and border applications for video surveillance and security team access and WPA2 support with AES is essential."
Pricing and availability
MD4000 family of Structured Mesh(TM) wireless node prices begin at $2400 and the product is shipping today, including the 802.11e and WPA2 features at no additional charge.
About Third-Generation Wireless Mesh
First-generation wireless mesh networking products serve both users and backhaul (node-to-node) connections with a single 802.11b radio. Easy to deploy, these solutions were popular in pioneering municipal deployments, but many users were disappointed by low bandwidth performance, excessive delay and jitter, and poor support of voice and video due to contention for the single radio channel. Second-generation wireless mesh products added a second radio to each node to segregate backhaul and service traffic, but contention still limits bandwidth and delay and jitter performance.
Third-generation wireless mesh networking solutions offer much higher performance, especially in multi-hop topologies, by providing separate paths for backhaul communications towards and away from the wired Internet connection as well as one or more service radios in each node. MeshDynamics is the first to accomplish this through dynamic channel-agile radio management. Unlike other hardware-focused solutions, MeshDynamics products offer the power of third-generation performance but deploy as easily as first-generation solutions. Delivered on 802.11 protocols today, MeshDynamics' radio-agnostic technology allows easy future migration to WiMAX and other radio technologies.
Unlike other third-generation solutions, MeshDynamics' technology is based on distributed radio-frequency software intelligence in each wireless mesh networking node, not expensive proprietary RF switching hardware, custom radios, or costly specialized antennas. This makes MeshDynamics' MD4000 family of Structured Mesh(TM) wireless nodes extremely cost-effective compared to hardware-focused third generation solutions.
About MeshDynamics
MeshDynamics delivers one of the only third-generation wireless mesh networking solutions for high-performance outdoor date, voice, and video networking. Based on sophisticated dynamic channel-agile networking algorithms, MeshDynamics' MD4000 family of Structured Mesh(TM) wireless nodes deliver very low-latency and -jitter performance, even over multi-hop topologies where many earlier generation wireless mesh networking products fail. MeshDynamics' products are in use worldwide in metro/municipal networks, homeland security/defense, and transportation applications. MeshDynamics, Inc. is privately held and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.