Wireless networking is quickly becoming a defacto standard in the enterprise, streamlining business processes to deliver increased productivity, reduced costs and increased profitability. Security has remained one of the largest issues as companies struggle with how to ensure that data is protected during transmission and the network itself is secure. Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) offered an interim security solution, but was not without constraints that resulted in increased security risks. The new WPA2 (802.11i) standards eliminate these vulnerabilities and offer truly robust security for wireless networks. As a global leader in wireless networking, Motorola, through the acquisition of the former Symbol Technologies, not only offers this next-generation of wireless security - but also builds on the new standard with value-added features that further increase performance and the mobility experience for all users.

Overview

Corporations are increasingly being asked to allow wireless network access to increase business productivity, and corporate security officers must provide assurance that corporate data is protected, security risks are mitigated and regulatory compliance is achieved. This chapter will discuss:

• The risks of wireless insecurity;

• The progression of security standards and capabilities pertaining to Wi-Fi security;

• How the 802.11i standard provides robust security for demanding wireless environments;

• How Motorola incorporates 802.11i in its wireless switching products in a way that optimizes scalability, performance and investment protection.

Risks of Wireless Insecurity

The advent of wireless computing and the massive processing power available within portable devices provides organizations with an unprecedented ability to provide flexible computing services on-demand to enable business initiatives.

What you can learn from this chapter is what services are being commonly deployed in Municipal Wireless networks, for what type of customers, some of the networking considerations that each service may drive, and some high-level architectural diagrams. As you will see, one of the key issues is where and how much network control should be implemented. One of the fundamental decisions that a network operator has to determine for an IP network is whether to centralize or distribute the network control. In this context, network control is based on the control of data flow associated with each user. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Note that this chapter does not intend to make any recommendations regarding this design issue. The high-level diagrams shown throughout this chapter convey the design concepts that network operators will encounter as they build their network infrastructures.

Introduction

Municipal Wireless networks are a hot new topic that is changing the face of telecom today. With the ability to offer broadband speeds over the airwaves, governments and service providers have all looked at this network approach as a way to enhance their services to the community. Over 300 governments have created Municipal Wireless networks, ranging in size up to 2 square miles. Many more governments are planning deployments with the world's largest cities planning deployments of over 100 square miles.

The drivers for the creation of these networks are varied.

The proliferation of wireless multi-hop communication infrastructures in office or residential environments depends on their ability to support a variety of emerging applications requiring real-time video transmission between stations located across the network. We propose an integrated cross-layer optimization algorithm aimed at maximizing the decoded video quality of delay-constrained streaming in a multi-hop wireless mesh network that supports quality-of-service (QoS). The key principle of our algorithm lays in the synergistic optimization of different control parameters at each node of the multi-hop network, across the protocol layers - application, network, medium access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers, as well as end-to-end, across the various nodes. To drive this optimization, we assume an overlay network infrastructure, which is able to convey information on the conditions of each link. Various scenarios that perform the integrated optimization using different levels (“horizons”) of information about the network status are examined. The differences between several optimization scenarios in terms of decoded video quality and required streaming complexity are quantified. Our results demonstrate the merits and the need for cross-layer optimization in order to provide an efficient solution for real-time video transmission using existing protocols and infrastructures. In addition, they provide important insights for future protocol and system design targeted at enhanced video streaming support across wireless mesh networks.

Introduction

Wireless mesh networks are built based on a mixture of fixed and mobile nodes interconnected via wireless links to form a multi-hop ad-hoc network.

Introduction

Wireless mesh networking is rapidly gaining in popularity with a variety of users: from municipalities to enterprises, from telecom service providers to public safety and military organizations. This increasing popularity is based on two basic facts: ease of deployment and increase in network capacity expressed in bandwidth per footage.

So what is a mesh network? Simply put, it is a set of fully interconnected network nodes that support traffic flows between any two nodes over one or more paths or routes. Adding wireless to the above brings the additional ability to maintain connectivity while the network nodes are in motion. The Internet itself can be viewed as the largest scale mesh network formed by hundreds of thousands of nodes connected by fiber or other means, including, in some cases, wireless links.

In this chapter we will look more closely into wireless mesh networks.

History

Mesh networking goes back a long time; in fact tactical networks of the military have relied on stored and forward nodes with multiple interconnections since the early days of electronic communications. The advent of packet switching allowed the forwarding function of these networks to be buried in the lower layers of communication systems, which opened up many new possibilities of improving the capacity and redundancy of these networks. Attracted by the inherent survivability of mesh networks, the US Defense research agency DARPA has funded a number of projects aimed at creating a variety of high-speed mesh networking technologies that support troop deployment on the battlefield as well as low speed, high survival sensor networks.

“Epilogue” – it sounds like the story is ending. But obviously the Wi-Fi story is continuing strong, evidenced by the contents of this book.

So let us consider this as not an “epilogue”, but as just a brief pause to catch our breath. This book has covered so many of the topics that we know are important today. But based on our past experience, who really knows what future applications will be dreamed up? Who really knows which new technologies will prove to be important in the future evolution of Wi-Fi? It is very humbling to recall that back in the early and mid-1990s, when the IEEE 802.11 standards were originally being developed, the primary application on the minds of the key participants was not networking in the home, or wireless Internet access, or public hotspots, or voice over IP, or multimedia services, or city-wide wireless – but things like wireless bar code scanning and retail store inventory management. These ”vertical” applications for Wi-Fi technology continue to be important today, but oh how far we have travelled.

So only an actual seer could predict the real future of Wi-Fi over the next 10 years. But one thing is clear: Wi-Fi will continue to play a role in our lives. Everything in technology has a finite lifespan – hardware products have a lifespan, software products have a lifespan – but the lifespan of a successful protocol, implemented in millions of devices worldwide, can be very, very long.

About This Book

This book provides an introduction to Bluetooth wireless technology and Bluetooth programming, with a specific focus on the parts of Bluetooth that concern a software developer. While there is already a host of existing literature about Bluetooth, few of these texts are written for the programmer who is concerned primarily with creating Bluetooth software applications. Instead, they tell all about Bluetooth, when most of the time, the programmer is interested only in a tiny fraction of this information.

This book purposefully and happily leaves out a great deal of information about Bluetooth. Concepts are simplified and described in ways that make sense to a programmer, not necessarily the ways they're laid out in the Bluetooth specification. The approach is to start simply, allowing the reader to quickly master the basic concepts with the default parameters before addressing a few advanced features.

Despite these omissions, this book is a rigorous introduction to Bluetooth, albeit with a narrow focus. Applications can be developed without an understanding of the radio modulation techniques or the algorithms underlying the generation of Bluetooth encryption keys. Programmers, however, do need to understand issues such as the available transport protocols, the processes governing establishing connections, and the mechanisms for transferring data.

We strongly believe in learning by example and have included working programs that demonstrate the concepts and techniques introduced in the text.