Being a manufacturer in the tech industry, we like to throw around big words like “security”, “scalable”, and “flexible”. But what the heck do these things really mean? Our big issue at AirWave is that we are a network “management” solution for wireless LANs. But this word “management” is so overused that anyone outside of AirWave rarely can tell exactly what we do unless we spend 5 minutes breaking it down for them. So let me try to explain all the different types of “management” involved in the wireless LAN arena and exactly what we mean by being a “network management” company.

Management can be broken down into three main categories:

• Data Management
• RF Management
• Network Management

Data Management is about what happens with and to end users packets as they travel over the WLAN and through the network. Data management can include the use of tunnels, authentication and encryption, packet analysis and just about anything that is “in the packet path”. More times than not, when people are talking about this form of “management” they are answering questions like:

• How do you determine who can get on the network?
• What applications are users working with once they are on the WLAN?
• How is the end user traffic being routed on the network?
• What is going wrong at the packet level?

RF Management is about troubleshooting and tuning communications that are truly wireless, usually between an access point and an end user’s client card. This usually has to do with the frequencies being used for communication, protocols within the 802.11 framework, location determining technologies, and other radio specific questions. Many of the advanced (auto-magic) RF features touted by the WLAN switch companies fall into this category including automatic channel setting, load balancing, and fail-over. Questions being answered include:

• How do I prevent interference?
• How can I load balance users across access points?
• What is the right channel for my access point?
• What does my spectrum look like?

That leave us with my personal favorite, Network Management. Network management is about utilization, performance, configuration, maintenance and trouble shooting. The FCAPS model does a good job of categorizing several of the functions (but I think it confuses some of the data management functions). Network management is typically done outside the packet path and collects data from the network via passive protocols like SNMP. These systems will continually collect information about the network and present information in helpful reports as well as generate alarms when certain error conditions are met. Network management will answer questions like:

• How many people were on my network last month?
• How much bandwidth is Bob Jones using?
• Is that access point up or down?
• What do my configurations look like?
• Are we meeting our service level metrics?

As you can imagine, each of these 3 different layers of management are very important in the WLAN landscape, especially for enterprise deploying mission-critical wireless LANs.