Aruba Networks launches platform designed for HD video
Enterprise WLAN provider Aruba Networks has been entrenching itself deeper into the industrial and public-safety WLAN market since acquiring outdoor mesh vendor Azalea Networks for $27 million nearly a year ago.
This week the company introduced the Aruba AirMesh outdoor wireless solutions portfolio that features a quad-radio architecture and Layer-3 routing. The platform is designed to improve scalability for large mesh networks that service municipalities and outdoor industrial installations.
The key feature of the solutions portfolio is the delivery of high-definition video, which Aruba is touting for industrial and public-safety users. Greg Murphy — Aruba’s vice president and general manager of outdoor, mesh and industrial — said that the new solution is built on Azalea’s key intellectual property, which enables the company to optimize HD video across large and scaled mesh networks.
“In a typical mesh network, each time you have to hop across the wireless network, you lose 40% to 50% of capacity on that single hop,” Murphy said. “When you are covering a city, there is going to be data traveling six or seven hops, and you have little capacity left to support services like video.”
Murphy said that by leveraging Azalea’s intellectual property, deploying new 802.11n technology, and utilizing directional antennas along with multiple radios — up to four radios for backhaul — the company’s large-scale network has enough capacity to deliver HD video and other data-intensive services.
Specifically, Aruba’s Active Video Transport is designed to prioritize the video traffic and can identify video frames at a rate of 30 frames per second, which is a critical capability in the delivery of HD video over multiple hops, the company said.
Aruba’s AirMesh network already is being used at the port of Yokohama, Japan, to deliver IP camera and weather-sensor information to iPhones and iPads used by workers at the port. Meanwhile, the Seattle Police Department uses the network to carry video traffic, and cameras, wireless mesh routers and antennas can be moved and repositioned throughout the city.
The Aruba AirMesh family includes rugged single-, dual- and quad-radio platforms that deliver up to 300 Mbps per radio. Each software-configurable radio can function as a mesh backhaul link or access point (AP) that operates in multiple frequencies for optimal performance and sustained throughput over multiple hops. Additionally, long-range directional antennas enable data transmission at distances up to six miles.