The Pleasanton, California-based company is one of the second generation of WLAN vendors which, rather than deploying its APs directly onto the corporate LAN, proposed a separately switched overlay network, with thin rather than fat APs managed centrally by the dedicated WLAN switch.
The big innovation in version 6.0 of the Mobility System Software (MSS) platform that runs on the Trapeze switches, said Bart Tillmans, marketing director for the vendor in Europe, is the fact that the forwarding agent can now be embedded out in the APs. This means that encryption and authentication is carried out there, which enables the AP to determine what to do with the flow of traffic without having to go back to the core of the network, Tillmans said.
Once a VoIP caller has been authenticated by one AP, he said, the call will be handed over directly from one AP to another without recourse to the central switch. This is important today for VoIP QoS, and in the future when 802.11n comes in, enabling bandwidths of 500Mbps per user, you don’t want to clog up the network by running that amount back to the core.
Trapeze reckons this to be unique among WLAN switch vendors, in that the others are still doing their encryption and authentication on the switch itself, said Tillmans.
The Smart Mobile branding exercise follows rival WLAN switch vendor Aruba Wireless Networks Inc, which also started talking about what it did as Mobile Edge technology last year. This trend show both vendors seeking to position themselves for the emerging market in voice-over-WiFi (VoWiFi) technology, as well as to gain some attention in a market where they must compete with a vendor of the clout of Cisco Systems Inc, which bought the third WLAN switch vendor of their generation, Airespace, at the end of 2004.
Version 6.0 also sees Trapeze stepping into mesh network. For the outdoor market, it has already offered bridging between buildings, as well as an outdoor AP with wireless backhaul to the switch. Now Trapeze is adding the ability for an outdoor AP to associate to another AP that is connected physically to the switch for greater reach.
