Aruba Networks Releases New Technical Brief on Using Adaptive Wireless LANs for E9-1-1

Aruba Networks, a provider of wireless local area networks (LANs) and secure mobility solutions, has announced the availability of a new technical brief on using adaptive wireless LANs for Enhanced 9-1-1 (E9-1-1) emergency call handling in campus environments.


The new technical brief is called “Looking for Trouble.” It explains how Company’s solution feed data on Wi-Fi phone location to Cisco’s Unified Communications (News - Alert) Manager (UCM) and Emergency Responder (CER) systems for delivering a complete E9-1-1 solution.

Since Wi-Fi phones are untethered from the wired connections usually used to identify physical location, they present “unique challenges for E9-1-1 systems.

“The popularity of Wi-Fi devices, including PC-based soft phones, in campus deployments presents a challenge to emergency response services because these highly mobile devices are difficult to locate using conventional 9-1-1 services,” said Peter Thornycroft (News - Alert), author of the technical brief.

He said that “'Looking for Trouble” discusses the challenges of designing a wireless LAN for E9-1-1 services. In addition, it also explains how Aruba’s centralized architecture interfaces with UCM and CER to meet the needs of campus deployments.

In order to be effective, emergency services calls must be processed and acted upon quickly, said officials. To meet this need with stationary wired phones, enterprise private branch exchanges (PBXs) incorporate emergency call handling features. This associates a phone’s extension number with a specific physical location on a one-to-one basis.

A VoIP extension number moves with the telephone. Also, it is not tied to the location of the phone jack into which it's plugged. Officials said that the location identification is lost if a VoIP phone is moved.

A technology was developed to overcome this problem. The technology identified the Ethernet edge switches to which VoIP phones were connected, and then extracted pre-configured location data from the switches. All IP PBX (News - Alert) vendors incorporate some variant of this location methodology to deliver E9-1-1 services.

Officials said that Wi-Fi phones present a problem in this scheme because they are untethered from the wired network. Upon power-up Wi-Fi phones connect to wireless access points. Then, the Wi-Fi phones connect to Ethernet edge switches and register with the IP PBX.

Officials said that once registered, Wi-Fi phones can and do roam anywhere within a building or campus without a fixed physical connection to the network.

Aruba's centralized architecture is designed to allocate the IP address of each Wi-Fi phone when it associates with an access point.