University of Maryland Manages Campus-Wide Wireless LAN With Wavelink Mobile Manager

Popular With An Increasingly Mobile Student Body, Wireless Computing Sees Rapid Growth at University of Maryland College Park

Whether registering for classes, searching the library for resources, reading the latest e-mail, or checking out the day´s menu at the dining hall, students at the University of Maryland don´t have to go far to connect to the campus computer network for the information they need. Many simply open up their wireless laptop or PDA between classes to get online fast.

Located in the busy high-tech corridor between Baltimore and Washington D.C., the 1500 acre University of Maryland College Park campus is rapidly building out campus-wide WiFi coverage to accommodate popular demand for wireless connectivity.

The university has long been a technology leader, setting a "port-per-pillow" connectivity standard in its residence halls. Each dormitory room is wired with a high-speed connection to the university's information technology infrastructure. There are a number of hard-wired computer labs, and several classrooms that have Ethernet ports at every seat. Never-the-less, demand for wireless connectivity is growing fast.

GOING MOBILE

Wireless access is especially important to a large population of non-resident faculty, staff, and commuting students. "People move around a lot here," says Leah Goldman, University of Maryland College Park student and senior network engineer. Goldman is responsible for the design and deployment of the wireless network. "You may not have an office or a phone or a place to sit, but now you can go pretty much anywhere on campus and have access to the network."

Wireless access is currently available throughout 38 classroom buildings on campus thanks to a wireless initiative dubbed Mobile at Maryland (MAM) that´s now over three years old. Initially, every classroom building got at least one WiFi access point - usually in open areas where students tend to congregate. Coverage was also provided in each of seven libraries. Then the university extended coverage to the outdoor malls and plazas.

CHALLENGE

Today at University of Maryland College Park, there are over 245 WiFi access points installed. That number is set to nearly double in the next quarter. The goal is full WiFi coverage of the sprawling urban campus with an estimated total of 1800 access points.

That´s a lot of new network infrastructure to manage. And the university quickly realized it needed new tools for the task. "We knew we needed a management solution for our wireless LAN," says Goldman. "Early on, we discovered that physically webbing into each access point was a real pain. You could see them all, but you would have to log in to each one individually to configure them. That took a lot time."

Over the course of the wireless initiative, University of Maryland College Park has installed several generations of Cisco access points - 350s, 1100s, and 1200s. "Cisco recommended Wavelink," says Goldman. "I liked Wavelink Mobile Manager when I first saw it, so we bought it right away."

"With Mobile Manager, given the IP address of each access point, everything can be done automatically for you," Goldman explains. "It probably saves about 30 minutes per access point."

Over time, Mobile Manager - installed on a central server - has grown to become an increasingly important tool for administering and maintaining the network. "I like the way you can organize all the access points into folders. We have a folder for every building," says Goldman who has used Mobile Manager to set up different profiles for different buildings. "It does auto-discovery to give you an all-over view of what you have, and from the administrator interface, you can go directly to the web interface for an individual access point."

SOLUTION

"Mobile Manager has made my day-to-day administrative job much easier," says Goldman. "Before, our management tools would just ping the interfaces to see what was on or off. When we saw a problem, we had to schlep out to the access point with our gear to see what was wrong. Now, with Mobile Manager, if something happens to an access point, we can see it at the central console and do some trouble shooting to find out what kind of error we´re getting. Frequently, we can reset the access point from there to solve the problem. It´s a lot faster."

"When we need to do a firmware update, we can blast one update off to a whole group of access points," Goldman continues. "If we want to make a change to one or two parameters, we create a single profile, assign it to a group of access points and Mobile Manager makes all the changes for us automatically."

Goldman reports there have been some problems with interference and rogue access points on the wireless network. The university can use Mobile Manager to detect rogue access points. When they´re discovered, Goldman says, the ports are disabled.

For security, users must register the MAC address of their laptop or PDA to gain access. If someone attempts to log on with an unknown MAC address, they are redirected to a registration server. Further, the university offers a VPN client to users who want greater security.

WHAT´S NEXT

In the future, Goldman says the university is exploring the use of Internet Protocol Telephony over the Wireless LAN. The book store wants to try IP phones for its sales staff and Goldman is preparing an implementation plan.

Another beneficiary of the new wireless network is the campus police force who can file written reports from a laptop in their car while they´re on patrol in certain parts of the campus at night.

As the WiFi infrastructure has grown, and popularity increases, monitoring usage and traffic flow has become increasingly important. "It´s pretty busy," says Goldman. "There are a lot of neat tools with Mobile Manager that I can use to track usage. You can see patterns where people tend to congregate. At any time during the day we may have over 300 people using wireless. I think usage has more than doubled over last year. Every semester, we have more people access the wireless network."

ABOUT WAVELINK

Wavelink Corporation is a leading provider of wireless communications software and the developer of a wireless platform that enables enterprises to develop, manage and deploy wireless applications. Since 1992, Wavelink´s innovative software has powered a growing number of Fortune 1,000 companies and is rapidly becoming a standard in wireless network development, deployment and management, with more than 40,000 installations in over 50 countries. Wavelink supports the world´s most popular programming languages and device operating systems, and has extended its expertise from wireless local area networks (WLAN) to the wireless wide area networks (WWAN) space. For more information, please visit www.wavelink.com or call +1-425-823-0111.