Wireless network integration challenges in enterprise systems

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.

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.

Integrating Wireless Networks Securely into an Enterprise

Despite the rapid growth of the IEEE 802.11 standards and the rush to increase speeds, there continues to be a lagging growth to the areas of consistency and enterprise-wide authentication across all IEEE-based standards (Adams, Dimitriou, 2008). As of today (2011) the myriad of potential options for creating, configuring and managing a wireless network into an enterprise require deep expertise in one of several authentication technologies. This has become even more challenging as the threat levels and complexity of them continue to accelerate over time as well (Potter, 2007). The ability to hack through Secured Socket Layers (SSL) of Web-based applications just underscores how susceptible enterprise networks are and how easily they could be compromised (Rowan, 2010). To attain a level of security consistency, often the entire network must be slowed down to a minimal level to allow for packet checking and verification (Zhu, Fang, Wang, 2010). The security aspects of integrating wireless networks into an enterprise network are daunting and often require a reduction in speed and user functionality as a result.