Aruba Networks, Inc, world's number one player in distributed enterprise network solutions, has announced the deployment of Aruba's HIPAA-compliant 802.11n Wi-Fi networks for telemetry monitoring, voice communications and guest access by Milford Regional Medical Center (MRMC). The new adaptive wireless network will support more than 150 wireless Baxter Sigma infusion pumps; it also has a user-friendly secure guest access captive portal which can be run by administrative personnel without any IT assistance.

In a release, Darlene Rhodes the assistant director of MRMC said, 'Our legacy wireless network was cumbersome to manage, used MAC address filtering instead of the more secure WPA2, and offered limited wireless coverage in many parts of the hospital. When the time came to support wireless telemetry, an upgrade was mandatory. We used the opportunity to specify a multi-purpose network that could simultaneously handle telemetry, voice, and video instead of requiring separate networks as is often done. Three vendors were invited to participate in a technical bakeoff, during which we evaluated Aruba's adaptive Wi-Fi as well as micro-cell and single channel architectures. The demonstrated performance of Aruba's Adaptive Radio Management technology was very impressive, as were the breadth of their security provisions and the ease-of-use of the AirWave management platform. The project was awarded to Aruba and we never looked back.'

The new network will comprise of Aruba's 6000 Series Mobility Controller and more than 150 dual-radio AP-125 802.11n Access Points featuring Aruba's integrated spectrum analyzer. Aruba's AirWave Wireless Management Suite (AWMS) also facilitates operations management.

Real-time telemetry and voice applications are latency-sensitive and hence they require special handling to guarantee consistent delivery with full reliability. The application-aware fingerprinting feature of Aruba enables detecting the type of traffic which is traversing the network, and it works in collaboration with Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) and spectrum analyzer technologies to dynamically optimize network and client performance in real-time.

Like MRMC, many healthcare institutions have been migrating away from legacy Wi-Fi networks to newer 802.11n systems. An extensive cut-over from old to new, are often not feasible due to budget or scheduling constraints. This issue is addressed by the AirWave suite which supports multiple generations of wireless technology made by different vendors using special wireless standards.

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