Hardware Spotlight Focus on Firetide HotPoint Wireless Mesh Routers

*Correspondence to: Gilbert Held, 4-Degree Consulting, 4736 Oxford Road, Macon, GA 31210, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Over the past few years the use of wireless LANs has evolved from a curiosity to a necessity. When we travel to many Starbucks or McDonalds, visit an airport or check into a hotel or motel the chances are high that we are able to access the Internet via a wireless LAN connection. Unfortunately, wireless LANs have a finite transmission range which results in service areas resembling the topology of a few patches in a quilt, resulting in transmission dead zones being encountered just when we usually need a communications capability. One of the most innovative technologies to appear on the horizon since the beginning of the new millennium provides the mechanism to considerably extend the reach of wireless LANs. Referred to as wireless mesh networking, most implementations in currently released products are built upon IEEE 802.11a, b or g wireless LAN protocols. By adding an appropriate routing protocol to 802.11 technology it becomes possible to obtain an automatically configurable, self-healing mesh consisting of a series of platforms using 802.11 technology. This action in effect permits wireless LANs to be extended over a campus, industrial park, suburban neighborhood, or even a city. Currently there are two primary methods being used to create wireless mesh networks. One method involves adding software to laptops, notebooks, desktops, and even PDAs, enabling those devices to participate as ad hoc members of a mesh network. as long as each device has a wireless LAN adapter. The second method involves the use of routing devices that transmit data using wireless LAN technology and include Ethernet ports in their hardware, enabling any computer with an Ethernet port to become a participant on a mesh network formed by the routers. In this column we will focus our attention on Firetide HotPoint wireless mesh routers which can be considered as supporting the second method used to form a wireless mesh network. That is, HotPoint routers include either two or three Ethernet 10/100 auto sensing ports. By simply plugging your computer or the port of a LAN switch into a HotPoint router you can take advantage of the self-forming, self-healing routing capability of the mesh network formed by the use of the routers.