Wireless access and IT deployment: learning basic technology concepts for IT professionals

Wireless Technology Is Difficult to Connect

To Other Parts of Information Systems

There are many challenging aspects to even the most fundamental system and process integration tasks within organizations that have standardized on a common platform. When platforms vary significantly by protocol and by technologies, as TCP/IP-based networks often do across any organization, integration becomes even more difficult. When the strategies and processes that organizations rely on to attain objectives are included in the analysis, the challenges become even greater. Because of the multiplicity of these factors, it is very difficult to connect the many forms of wireless technologies into legacy, third-party and enterprise-wide systems within an organization.

Lack of Integration at the Protocol Structural Level

At the most fundamental level of integration wireless networks often support a varying standard to the Carrier Sense Multiple Access, Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) based protocols that full category-5 cabled networks do, in addition to having more options for optimizing network performance. Wireless protocols for example support both asynchronous and synchronous communication and have for decades successfully compared to many legacy information systems platforms from proprietary vendors including IBM and their Token Ring standard and others (Adams, Dimitriou, 2008). Wireless networks have quickly moved forward with their own standards, driven by the acceleration of the IEEE 802.11 baseline that define the technologies, parameters and options used acorss the frequency spectrum of wireless networks. These standards are also being driven by the accelerating nature of new product development cycles and the reliance on often conflicting, yet continually improving, Wi-Fi standards. While speed and customization of IEEE 802.11 standards continues ironically these networks have less versatility than a fully-wired counterpart using standard TCP/IP-based command structures and configuration (Macedo, dos Santos, Correia, Nogueira, Pujolle, 2010). Wi-Fi is heavily hyped today as it is seen as a critical marketing message for smartphones, tablet PCs, laptops and many other devices. In reality, the reliance on Wi-Fi standards has actually slowed down the performance of entire enterprise networks and has also led to "dead zones" within companies where wireless networks cannot either be configured or used due to security concerns (Adams, Dimitriou, 2008). The IEEE 802.11 standard, the lack of clarity on integration of wireless networks into legacy networking environments, the security and privacy concerns of using secured wireless networks, and the lack of adequate training in many organizations all lead to wireless networks failing to be successfully integrated into organizations. In addition to these structural issues, there are also performance and security issues that complicate the integration of wireless networks into companies as well.

The Challenges of Wireless Network Performance

In addition to the structural aspects of wireless networks not integrating well into legacy networks that are based on CSMA/CD and CSMA/CD (Token Ring) standards, there is also the lack of protocol consistency within and between wireless standards, which significantly reduces integration flexibility and performance as well. The conflicting protocol standards of wireless networks make full compatibility, connectivity and integration extremely difficult at the packet level, much less unifying a complex business process using varying protocols (Alonistioti, Patouni, Gazis, 2006). Of all factors most responsible for slowing the integration of wireless systems, this is the most common and most detrimental. There is also a lack of protocols for application development, data and information sharing, and security which is also minimizing the level of system integration, adoption and performance as well (Adams, Dimitriou, 2008). Addressing the performance aspects of wireless networks as part of the integration process has also led organizations to create ad hoc networks only, which comprises network performance for broader compatibility (Shidhani, Leung, 2010). Often system designers, system administrators, and network administrators must make the trade-off of which network topology and technology to use based on user's needs and the apparent performance gains of one protocol over another. Wireless networks and the evolution of WiMAX standards specifically have led to the development of wide-area wireless networks for entire business campuses (Macedo, dos Santos, Correia, Nogueira, Pujolle, 2010). These projects, as ambitious as they are, often only deliver mediocre performance, as the standards they are based on often require greater precision and configuration to be useful. The result is that while WiMAX standards continue to dominate much of the development efforts of device and infrastructure providers, they have yet to find a consistent implementation across diverse organizational networks, or work reliably as well. The net result is that due to the lack of integration consistency across wireless standards, platforms and systems, it is common to find only segments of an overall campus having full Internet access as a result.