ADTRAN Bluesocket vWLAN
Bringing the Power of Virtualization to Wireless

Overview:

ADTRAN’s Bluesocket^® virtual Wireless LAN (vWLAN) offers the industry’s first cloud-based, virtualized management and control solution for wireless LANs, eliminating physical, hardwarebased controllers from the network. By removing 100 percent of the controller hardware, Bluesocket vWLAN® eliminates scale limitations, and enables management and control of Access Points (APs) across multiple buildings, the corporate campus or across any geographic location.

Controller-less Architecture

The Bluesocket vWLAN was built from the ground up to solve the challenges associated with hardwarebased controllers. vWLAN’s unique distributed, out-of-band, controller-less architecture introduces the concept of splitting the management and control plane from the data plane. vWLAN centralizes management and control in the data center or server room (on a hypervisor), and distributes data with intelligent APs that enforce policies at the edge of the network. with vWLAN, there are no single points of failure, bottlenecks, traffic u-turns, or scalability concerns associated with hardware-based controllers.

Cloud-based Management and Control

This enables network administrators to configure, control and manage APs across multiple locations anywhere in the world, via the public or private cloud. Cloud management ensures, consistent policy management and seamless mobility. In addition, with an HTML5-based administrative interface users can access vWLAN from any iOS-, Androidor Windows-based mobile device.

Multi-tenant Support

Bluesocket vWLAN includes multi-tenant support with the ability to support multiple customers, enterprise divisions, or campuses on a single instance of vWLAN. This also enables Service Providers to provide managed and hosted wireless LAN service offerings to their customers.

Simplified Scalability and High-Density

Most hardware-based controllers can support approximately 150 access points and 4,000 users. By separating and virtualizing the management and control plane from the data plane, vWLAN breaks the constraints of hardware controllers allowing for massive scale. A single instance of vWLAN can support thousands of APs and users, across multiple locations or even multiple customers. Scalability of the vWLAN Virtual Appliance (hypervisor) is based on the virtual machine’s specifications (CPU/Cores and Memory). For high density deployments, the Bluesocket 1900 and 2030 APs do not include a hard limit on the number of clients per radio. Instead, customers can configure the maximum number of associated clients per radio based on application requirements to ensure a better user experience.

Built-in High Availability

Bluesocket vWLAN offers an industry first wireless LAN solution with “built-in” High Availability (HA). Customers can create a secondary instance of the vWLAN software in a backup datacenter, and upgrade the APs to HA mode. In the event the link to the primary vWLAN instance goes down, the APs will simply switch over control to the secondary instance, with no loss of data (“zero” packet loss). with Wi-Fi becoming critical to business operations, customers can confidently deploy vWLAN with the assurance of an always-on network.

Security at the Edge

A conventional hardware controller-based wireless network allows unwanted traffic to enter the LAN and reach the controller. vWLAN takes advantage of intelligent APs that operate a stateful firewall to enforce security at the edge and turn away all unwanted traffic—never allowing potential security risks to enter the network.

Unified Access with Wired and Third-party AP Support

Bluesocket vWLAN offers the industry’s first software-enabled support for both wired and wireless users. This is a software upgrade option that allows integrated management and control of all users irrespective of method of access— Bluesocket APs, wired ports or even from any third-party AP. This simplifies administration, and enables an enterprise to create a truly unified wireless and wired network providing a seamless user experience, and consistent authentication irrespective of a user’s access method.

Optimized Performance

A typical hardware controller has a fixed backplane capacity, which limits the available throughput to the APs that the controller manages. with vWLAN’s unique distributed data architecture, data is switched at the AP and system capacity is no longer dictated by the backplane capacity. Rather, it is determined by the aggregate throughput of the APs. This provides an additional advantage, as there is no need for a forklift upgrades as new 802.11 standards come into play.

Flexible Deployment Options

Bluesocket vWLAN can be deployed on a no cost vWLAN Virtual Appliance (VMware^®) or a low cost vWLAN Appliance (hardware). In addition, ADTRAN offers ProCloud Wi-Fi, a cloud-hosted and fully managed wireless LAN for a worry free Wi-Fi experience.

Portfolio of High-Performance APs

The Bluesocket vWLAN solution includes a family of high-performance APs that are a perfect fit for enterprises, educational institutions, hospitality, and healthcare providers who are looking to move their organizations to a pervasive mobility environment. The Bluesocket 1800, 1900 and 2030 Series of enterprise-class APs are completely plug-and-play requiring no manual configuration.

They include:

• 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) support
• Mesh networking
• Configurable maximum associated clients per radio
• Load balancing for high-density deplooyments
• DynamicRF (Radio Resource Management) for automatic channel, transmission power and neighbor discovery
• Multi-cast to unicast conversion, fast roaming, and standards-based transmit beamforming (TxBF)
• Increased sensitivity for mobile devices with low transmission power (tablets, smartphones)
• Support for Apple Bonjour-based services, Apple Captive Network Assistant (CNA) and Microsoft’s Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI)