The portfolio, which is branded TenQ in the international market, is the result of last year’s acquisition of Real Object Oriented Technology Inc by Allied Telesis Holdings KK, ATI’s parent company. ROOT was a Tokyo-based developer of more advanced wireless products in wireless LAN and Mobile IP routing, WiMAX, in-vehicle and VoIP communications.
In Japan, where the ROOT products are still marketed under their original brand, they enable internet access on the country’s high-speed trains and public transport. In Hong Kong, they are deployed on the city’s underground rail network, as well as the local Disneyland.
The TenQ technology is in fact an implementation of Mobile IP, an IETF standard (RFC2002), with some proprietary extensions in the area of fast authentication that enable it to carry out seamless handover even when the user is moving along a rail track at 300km an hour.
Mobile IP was created to enable data sessions on a IP connection to continue even though the laptop or PDA on which they are being conducted is in motion, the challenge there being that it will be changing IP addresses as it goes, which would normally result in the session dropping as each change would require a new authentication process prior to access to the network.
It overcomes that problem by inserting into the connection something called a home agent, which in turn holds a permanent IP address (i.e. the home address) for the session, then talks to a client on the roving laptop or PDA, which at any one time will be on what is referred to as a care-of address that dynamically changes as it moves from one place to another.
Packets sent to a care-of address by the home agent go over an encrypted tunnel with a new header, while the original header is preserved inside the encrypted traffic and revealed on reception once the latter is decrypted.
While enabling data sessions to continue, however, Mobile IP still requires authentication of each new care-of address, which adds a degree of micro-latency as handover takes place. The TenQ technology, therefore, adds some proprietary smarts to reduce the handover time to what Rino Intrieri, European marketing director for new technology at ATI, claims to be in the sub-50-millisecond range.
The authentication process requires the exchange of just three packets, the first from client to authentication server with the request, the second from authentication server to client granting it, with an access controller seeing it en route to give access, and the third from client to home agent to register the care-of address, he explained.
As to the markets ATI is targeting with the TenQ technology, there are three, each with somewhat different implementations. For enterprises, the company makes the Home Agent, Authentication Server and Management System, which could be software packages but, for ease of implementation will initially be bundled onto discrete appliances.
Then there are the Access Controllers, again in the form of appliances deployed between a corporate WLAN infrastructure (i.e. the access points and switch) and the LAN. Each client device must then receive a small TenQ software client to communicate with the system, and while the Home Agent and Authentication Server can each handle up to 50 clients, each Access Controller can support up to 70 concurrent sessions.
In the transportation market, the data session is on the move even though the client device will probably be in one place on the train or bus, and as such may be on a wired or wireless connection, depending on the train operator’s preference.
In this scenario, the technology works by placing a number of what ATI calls a TenQ Micro Base Stations along the track, probably with a fiber connection, then a single TenQ Mobile Router on the train, with Ethernet ports into which an on-board network, be it wired or wireless, can be plugged. In other words, for this application there is not the requirement for the client devices to be fitted with TenQ clients, since they will reside in the Mobile Router.
Finally there will be wireless service providers, which may be municipalities, universities or hospitals, and in this scenario, TenQ can simply be the last mile, said Intrieri. For that market, ATI is making a more compact, indoor version of the TenQ Base Station, which will talk to the larger outdoor one mounted on lampposts in the street. There is also a hybrid version to go on top of a building if the end user lives or works in the basement, he went on.
ATI is rolling TenQ out in Europe before the Americas, a strategy motivated by the greater presence of rail transport in the Old Continent. The rail operators there also have more money, Intrieri added. A US launch will follow shortly, however, as there is clearly more of a head of steam behind municipal WiFi in North America than in Europe right now.
Mobile IP was initially conceived to enable data sessions to roam between WLAN subnets. However, voice over IP (VoIP) technology effectively transforms voice traffic into another data stream, i.e. another IP application on a network, albeit one that, like video, has a real-time requirement that traditional data apps usually don’t. In other words, it has a very low tolerance for latency before conversations become incomprehensible.
The proprietary add-ons ATI acquired when it bought ROOT, therefore, make the TenQ technology potentially suitable for use in enabling wireless VoIP both in WLAN and even wireless WAN environments.
For starters, it operates at Layer-3, making it agnostic to the radio access mode being used (cellular, WiFi, WiMAX, etc). And since it runs the traffic to the client device over an encrypted tunnel, an enterprise customer could run it to mobile handsets fitted with TenQ clients as a data session, regardless of whether it actually contained voice packets.
ATI is clearly aware of this potential, and indeed Melvyn Wray, the company’s senior VP of marketing for EMEA is already talking about an advanced mobility system integrating GSM and WiFi for enterprise customers, though he should probably be more generic and refer to cellular, since the technology is equally applicable to CDMA networks. In other words, ATI sees TenQ as an enabler of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC).
For that to become a reality, however, will require integration with another offering the company, which is based in Tokyo and has its international HQ in San Jose, California, has just announced, initially for the European market, namely its VioCall VoIP platform. VioCall has various flavours, of which the enterprise one, called VioCall Professional Connect, targets companies with between 50 and 30,000 users and is, in essence, a software-only IP PBX (see separate story).
Intrieri said ATI is working on integration of TenQ and VioCall for the end of this year, at which point TenQ clients on mobile handsets will be able, over a wireless AP, to request authentication from a TenQ Authentication Server, then have voice traffic routed over the corporate LAN via a VioCall Server.
When off campus, meanwhile, the TenQ-fitted phone will be able to make VoIP calls over the IP layer of a cellular network (in the GSM world, from GPRS onwards), and the phone will know which route to take (i.e. WiFi or cellular) based on least-cost routing intelligence coded into the client.
Another thing ATI will have to do to make that vision possible is to widen the range of operating systems on which the TenQ client works. At the moment it supports regular Windows and MacOS for laptops and Windows Mobile 5.0 for PDAs and smart phones, but of course, the bulk of smart phones in operation run the Symbian OS. Intrieri said a Symbian version of the client will be available by the end of this year.
