Xirrus’ unique architecture is built to scale to meet from low to high wireless performance requirements. The multi-radio, directional antenna design provides the greatest coverage and throughput of any solution in the industry. This ultimately enables a wired like experience on a wireless network.
Application Performance
The applications run over wireless networks today are increasingly bandwidth hungry and sophisticated, with rich media and cloud-based content. Millions of Wi-Fi enabled smartphones and tablets are being activated daily, and users are bringing these non-corporate devices onto the network along with user-driven, non-managed applications. The Xirrus wireless solution is designed to scale to meet the performance challenges presented by device and application proliferation, equipped with more modular APs per Array and therefore more available Wi-Fi bandwidth compared to traditional 2 radio APs. More bandwidth equates to faster application performance for users. Beyond these architectural differences, Xirrus provides application-level visibility and control in each Array for improving application performance. The ability to allow/deny, throttle and apply QoS to specific applications at the network edge is essential to maintaining network capacity for critical applications and users.
User Performance
Xirrus wireless solutions provide a number of options of optimizing the performance of the network based upon the type of user. Policies can be set and enforced based on a user’s identity, role, or device type. Once identified, these elements can be used to determine the level of resources available to the user. Bandwidth limits ensure power users do not overrun resources and starve others. Policies can be set to enforce usage for different device types. For instance, corporate users on laptops may be given preferential service compared with tablets and smartphones which are delivered best effort service.
The multi-radio design of the Xirrus Array enables the ability to allocate modular APs to different users. For instance, one modular AP could be assigned to a keynote speaker at a convention and the other modular APs to audience members. This resource separation ensures sufficient bandwidth to the most critical user on the network. As another example, devices with slower technologies (e.g. 802.11b) can be separated from those using faster technologies (e.g. 802.11n) on different modular APs so as to not negatively impact performance for the fast users.
Network Performance
For Wi-Fi networks to deliver sufficient performance to users, there must be sufficient bandwidth available on both the wireless side and wired sides of the network. Traditional enterprise wireless solutions rely on a centralized controller for management and often packet processing resources. This approach creates a potential performance bottleneck as well as a single point of failure. As more APs and clients access the network, centralized controllers can become overrun and are expensive to upgrade. With the Xirrus approach, a controller is built into each Array. As Arrays are added to the network to scale, more processing power is added and the system linearly scales and no bottlenecks are created. Ultimately, the Xirrus Array integrates to the network like a wired Ethernet switch with all of packet and control processing at the edge of the network.
To further improve network performance, each Array enforces traffic policies directly at the network edge. An integrated stateful firewall and ACLs filter unwanted network traffic directly at the edge rather than traversing the network to the controller or otherwise.
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RF Performance
The multi-radio and directional antenna design of the Xirrus Wireless Array provides significantly greater control of RF design and management compared to traditional APs. Each radio within a Xirrus Array can be set to operate in either 2.4GHz or 5GHz, allowing the design to match client types today and adapt in the future as needed. This contrasts to traditional APs which are fixed in design with one radio in 2.4GHz, one in 5GHz, and no flexibility to change based on client requirements.
Xirrus Arrays support automatic channel and power control to appropriately configure RF resources for optimal performance. Proper RF design is essential to ensure best system performance, especially in high user density scenarios. Auto Channel scans the RF environment on a radio-by-radio basis, coordinated among all Arrays in the network, to determine the best channel of operation per radio. Auto Cell is an automatic, self-tuning mechanism that balances cell size between Arrays to ensure sufficient coverage, limit co-channel and adjacent channel interference among Arrays, and ultimately optimize system performance.
More Productive Employees
With a high performance wireless network, employees are able to get more done. Mobility affords the opportunity to get work done from anywhere. By building a ubiquitous Wi-Fi network with sufficient performance and resilience, employees can get things done faster. If the wireless network is slow or unusable, employees cannot take advantage of mobile flexibility and productivity will negatively impacted.
Greater Range of Applications
New cloud-based and media applications are empowering employees to get more done and are more powerful than ever. Many of these applications are bandwidth intensive and often fail over existing Wi-Fi networks based on old designs and traditional architectures. By providing a high performance, scalable wireless network, users can use whatever applications they want and not be limited by the throughput of the Wi-Fi network.
Support for More Users
Wireless is becoming the preferred network connection for most users. With many devices such as tablets and smartphones, only a wireless connection is available. Being able to support the increased density of wireless users and their increasing bandwidth needs is crucial. Xirrus’ high performance architecture is designed to scale to meet these increasing performance requirements.
Better End-user Experience
Mobility gives users flexibility in where they can access the network and makes them more productive. If the end-user experience is not enjoyable, users will complain and give up. By designing for sufficient performance and scale from the start, a Xirrus wireless network can ensure the end-user experience needed for broad adoption and productivity gains to justify wireless infrastructure investment.
The Xirrus Performance Services are included in the base ArrayOS operating system and the Xirrus RF Performance Manager (RPM) Network Services package.
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