Roughly a year after acquiring Azalea Networks in a cash and stock deal valued at $40.5 million, Aruba Networks has introduced a solution for large outdoor mesh networks.
Aruba is leveraging Azalea's key intellectual property that is capable of routing traffic using specific algorithms that detect the shortest path through a mesh network to deliver applications requiring quality of service like high-definition video. It has introduced the Aruba AirMesh outdoor wireless solutions portfolio that features a quad-radio architecture and Layer-3 routing that is designed to improve scalability for large outdoor mesh networks for municipal and industrial deployments.
Greg Murphy, Aruba's vice president and general manager of outdoor, mesh and industrial, said in an interview that by leveraging the Azalea IP and adding new 802.11n technology, directional antennas along with multiple radios-up to four radios for backhaul-the company's large-scale network has enough capacity to deliver HD video and other data-intensive services.
As Aruba becomes more entrenched in the outdoor industrial Wi-Fi market, carrier-class Wi-Fi becomes an attractive follow-on market. "What we've seen is that lots of carriers are starting to look at how to leverage Wi-Fi technology to offload 3G," Murphy said. "So we're starting to see a lot of carriers get into that space with proof of concepts and production networks. The thing I find encouraging is when you look at applications causing the most traffic, it's video. From the position we are in now of having an infrastructure technology optimized for reliable delivery of HD video, that becomes an attractive follow-on market."
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