Aruba enters fixed mobile convergence market

VoIP (voice over IP) appears to be the driving force that will accelerate the move to what the telecom industry is calling fixed-mobile converged [FMC] devices, which are mainly handsets that can switch seamlessly between cellular and Wi-Fi using 802.11e Wi-Fi standards.

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While ordinary IEEE 802.11 technology is fine for data, voice calls require a higher degree of consistency and quality as voice data travels in the bit stream.

To that end, Aruba unveiled a technology road map for its voice-aware WLAN

"mobility" controllers.

 Paul DeBeasi, a senior analyst at The Burton Group, said this is the first time that a WLAN vendor is doing anything in the FMC space.

"The thing that causes me to pause -- this is just a roadmap. I will get excited when they actually deploy FMC and they have customers that say it doesn't drop calls and it works great," said DeBeasi.

All of the technology Aruba laid out in its announcement is standards-based, said Keerte Melkote, a co-founder of Aruba Networks. The company is building a reference client that they will provide as open source and will work on any wireless-based infrastructure, Melkote said.

"Any manufacturers can take the code and put it in their handset," said Melkote.

This month Aruba will release three specifications targeted at scalability, performance, and reliability.

Wireless Multimedia (WMM) distinguishes between different types of traffic in the air and provides the correct level of bandwidth for voice traffic. The AP (access point) will be able to handle multiple queues that are processing at the AP to ensure that the right level of traffic is in the right queue, Melkote said.

Also for security, WMM can identify a device masquerading as voice to gain priority.

"Without this capability it is like having a car pool lane with no police to monitor it. We have the cops inside the box," said Melkote.

Traffic Specification, also known as TSpec, alerts the network about the kind of data it is going to send and reserves an appropriate amount of bandwidth.

Finally, WMM with Power Save (WMM-PS) optimizes both talk time and standby time. Melkote said talk time is improved from 30 minutes to 4 hours, and standby time from 15 hours to 100 hours.

The technology does this by allowing the handset to be in sleep mode longer than it normally would and by putting it in standby mode between packets.

In the first half of 2007, Aruba will embed handoff technology between cellular and Wi-Fi networks directly into its controllers.

In the second half of 2007, Aruba plans to integrate its VoIP capabilities with cellular service providers' wireless architecture.

In 2008 Aruba will comply with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a 3GPP standard that will serve to create a converged IP-based network with a common architecture.

There are a number of benefits to the enterprise, said DeBeasi, one of which is in saving cellular minutes and cellular charges, and the other is superior coverage.

"When you go from cellular into a building, the cellular coverage is not that great, but if the phone transitions to Wi-Fi users will get better coverage," he said.