Aruba To Increase Wireless Performance with ARM 2.0

• By Chris Riedel
• 10/01/08

Aruba Networks has released new software designed to increase the speed and reliability of its 802.11 wireless networks.

The Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) 2.0 software uses infrastructure-based controls, allowing it to determine how WiFi clients interact with one another, resolving a variety of performance issues. According to Aruba Networks, this solution helps maintain sufficient network resources for voice, data, and video applications by optimizing the network connection for the needs of each.

Some of the new features include:

• Application awareness, protecting the performance of critical applications;
• Band steering, guiding clients to the appropriate wireless channel based on individual capacity;
• Spectrum load balancing, allowing an access point to move clients to other channels or access points with available bandwidth;
• Coordinated access, helping to balance and coordinate the load across all access point that share a single channel;
• Airtime fairness, providing equal access to all WiFi clients in a given "dense deployment" area; and
• Performance protection, preventing clients with 802.11n speeds from being hindered by clients using slower-speed connections.

"The need for infrastructure control will grow in importance as more applications migrate from dedicated wire ports onto shared wireless networks," said Keerti Melkote, Aruba's co-founder and chief technology officer, in a prepared statement. "There may be compelling performance reasons to dedicate part of the 5 GHz band to high speed 802.11n traffic, or allocate specific channels for power users or different types of applications. ARM 2.0 can address this situation by steering only 802.11n clients and associated applications to faster, quieter channels. ARM 2.0 makes wireless network behavior more predictable for both IT architects and end users."

According to Aruba, ARM 2.0 can be used in all new and existing Aruba deployments. The software will ship this quarter and will be available for free to existing customers under an Aruba support agreement.