Aruba Upgrades VoWLAN Infrastructure
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based infrastructure vendor added a packet inspection technology called Voice Flow Classification (VFC), which monitors voice calls on the WLAN and routes them around areas of network congestion, said Peter Thornycroft, product manager at Aruba.
VFC is part of Aruba's Mobile Edge WLAN architecture, designed to provide secure enterprise mobility for voice and data. That's achieved by integrating a stateful firewall into the mobility controller, which can identify VoWLAN signaling protocols such as Session Initiated Protocol (SIP), SpectraLink Voice Priority (SVP), Vocera and Cisco Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP), Thornycroft said.
"Now that we can look inside and interpret these signaling streams, we can build functionality on top of that," he said.
Another new feature, Advanced Core Admissions Control (CAC) automatically redirects voice traffic away from an access point that's getting overloaded, Thornycroft said. "Call quality can suffer when there are too many calls on one AP [access point], so CAC puts a threshold in place that says when there are a certain number of calls, it will load-balance voice clients away from that cell," he said.
Other new features include the ability to set priority for voice traffic based on the type of user and the ability for an access point in scan mode to automatically stop scanning to avoid interference, Thornycroft said.
The new features will be available this month as part of the 2.5 release of ArubaOS mobility controller software. ArubaOS 2.5 is available as an upgrade for Aruba's existing customers with support agreements.
Aruba also announced new partnerships with vendors SpectraLink, Vocera and Avaya. The alliances are designed to ensure smooth operation of third-party devices on Aruba's Mobile Edge architecture, Thornycroft said.