Wifi Revolution

In an effort to enhance its learning environment with the latest technology, Maine's Gorham School Department has added a new high-speed IEEE (News - Alert) 802.11n draft 2.0 wireless network from Meru Networks to its 850-student high school. Over the next several years, the school district plans to extend the WLAN to its three elementary schools.

The Meru WLAN was implemented to support the growing high-density wireless access needs arising in part from the efforts of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) to give every student a laptop computer beginning in middle school.

The WLAN supports activities ranging from students accessing the Internet to teachers completing student assessments, building schedules and taking attendance using Gorham's Student Information System. In addition, users will be able to connect to the network from outdoor venues such as athletic fields. 

 

Two specific wireless networks are supported: one for students and faculty with school-owned computers, the other for guests and those who bring their own laptops to school.

"I was flabbergasted that, with every high school teacher having a laptop and plans calling for every student to have one, there was no wireless access in the high school.  Wireless became priority number one.  We needed a system with sufficient capacity so that when we have one laptop per student, there won't be a bottleneck.  And that system had to be rich enough to support a move to wireless IP telephony in the future," said Dennis Crowe, who joined Gorham Schools in early 2008 as director of technology.

According to Crowe, central controller architecture was crucial to the schools' needs,

 

"Because Apple (News - Alert) is so big in the MLTI program, most schools have used Apple 'fat' APs, each of which has to be updated locally and individually.  With a centrally controlled wireless system, you can update all the APs at once from a remote location,” he added.

After assessing a variety of WLAN vendors, Crowe and his team selected Meru based on its virtual cell architecture and its Airtime Fairness capability.  The virtual cell approach uses a single radio frequency channel for all APs rather than assigning different channels to adjacent APs. This appealed to Crowe for its ability to support a high density of users.

"If you bring a cart full of laptops into a room and one AP starts to get overloaded, Meru's system automatically moves you to another AP and you don't notice any interruption or disconnection," Crowe said. "That was a great idea I didn't see with any of the other vendors.  This approach will be a lot more stable if we decide to go with wireless IP phones later for our more mobile personnel, such as administrators and physical education teachers" (the schools currently use an Avaya (News - Alert) wired IP telephony system).  And Meru's Airtime Fairness algorithm, which provides equal access for all clients regardless of access methods (e.g., 802.11 a, b, g or n) or speed, "made sense because no one client can suck up all the bandwidth."

Supporting up to five times the speed of the earlier 802.11a/b/g standards, Gorham selected an 802.11n network because the district wanted its APs to last for at least several years, and the new Mac laptops the schools are getting all support the 11n standard.

 

All Meru 802.11n AP are backward-compatible with the 11a/b/g standards.

Network connectivity at several areas in Gorham High School- the gymnasium, auditorium, athletic fields - is wireless-only, because these types of venues are challenging to wire, Crowe said.  But even in classrooms, he expects wireless to quickly replace wired as the primary means of network access.

"In most settings people think of the wireless network as the bottleneck; in our system today, the bottleneck is the wired network," he said.  "Our classrooms have only one wired network drop each.  So if there's more than one computer, you have to put in a switch, or - as I've seen some teachers doing - unplug the network wire from their desktop computer and plug it into their laptop. Wireless is cheaper, easier to install, and people aren't tripping over cords."

The Gorham High School wireless deployment uses Meru's AP320 dual-radio 802.11a/b/g/n access points, which support the creation of two full layers of wireless coverage network- wide; and an MC3000 series controller, which delivers the centralized intelligence to easily deploy and manage large-scale wireless WLANs.

In Meru's virtualized WLAN architecture, a single channel is selected for use by all access points enterprise-wide, and a "virtual port" is assigned to each client
device to gain the best performance, reliability, and enterprise control over wireless resources. Additional channels can be layered as more capacity is required. 

 

Compared to Meru’s WLAN, competing legacy WLAN systems use a "micro cell" approach, which assigns various radio channels to many small adjacent AP cells to ensure that no two APs use the same channel in the same place.  This requires accurate and time-consuming channel planning and AP power adjustments in order to work well, making it difficult to load-balance in dense environments, and restricting future network expansion.

The Gorham School Department is located in Gorham, Maine, 10 miles west of the city of Portland.  Currently, close to 2,700 students attend the district's high school, middle school and three elementary schools. 

Sunnyvale, California-based, Meru Networks (News - Alert) creates and markets wireless LAN infrastructure solutions that use virtualization to provide all-encompassing, high-fidelity wireless service for business-critical voice, video and data applications. Meru initially introduced its virtual cell wireless architecture in 2003. Its solutions have been adopted in all major industry vertical markets, including Fortune 500 enterprises, healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and government. 

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