AirFlow Networks First to Deliver Hardware-based Processing for Massive WLAN Scalability.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 12, 2004

New Silicon-Based Processing Delivers up to 10X Performance/Capacity

Increase; Supports New VoIP, Security, and Fault Tolerance Features

AirFlow Networks today announced the industry's first fully hardware-based implementation of wireless traffic processing, which provides significant improvements in wireless LAN (WLAN) performance and scalability. For the first time in the WLAN industry, all traffic throughout an entire WLAN is handled completely in silicon. This architecture delivers dramatic improvements in WLAN performance and scalability for business-critical data networking across very large networks, and offers significant quality-of-service (QoS) improvements for real-time applications, such as voice and video, over WLANs. AirFlow Networks also announced additional security and fault tolerance features as well as a new AirHub model.

AirFlow's hardware-based wireless switching is similar to what successful Ethernet switch vendors first implemented in 1997. Rather than using software and general-purpose CPUs to process traffic, switch vendors implemented hardware-based Layer 2 and Layer 3 solutions. The new performance and scalability of these hardware-based solutions ushered in a revolution that enabled today's large, mission-critical Ethernet networks. AirFlow is now the first wireless LAN vendor to apply these techniques to wireless LAN processing.

"Now that the security concerns with wireless networks have been addressed, customers are migrating their small-scale pilot WLANs into larger-scale networks that require performance guarantees, quality of service and scalability," said Dr. Harry Bims, CTO of AirFlow Networks. "When we first developed our platform, we anticipated that large-scale enterprise networks would have to scale easily without performance degradation, and our hardware-based implementation is the first to easily support the migration from pilots to mission-critical wireless networks."

AirFlow's silicon implementation provides high performance, deterministic QoS, and network scalability throughout the WLAN. It is available in the existing AirServer and AirSwitch products at no additional cost. With the new embedded functionality, these products now achieve greatly enhanced performance:

-- Processing throughput increased to 1Gbps per

AirServer/AirSwitch

-- Wireless client support increased to 10,000 per

AirServer/AirSwitch

-- Aggregating AirServer/AirSwitch wireless controllers can scale

total wireless processing throughput that exceeds 10Gbps

-- Overall WLAN capacity scales without degradation under

increased load

Silicon-Based Solution Quadruples Aggregate Capacity

AirFlow's silicon processing quadruples the overall aggregate capacity of a single AirSwitch or AirServer. A single AirServer or AirSwitch can now support over 100 AirHubs at line-rate capacity without degradation, and in most environments, one system can support several hundred AirHubs. In addition, one AirServer or AirSwitch can now support up to 10,000 clients, a tenfold improvement from the previous software-based implementation.

The hardware-based wireless processing also has significant benefits for latency- and jitter-sensitive applications, such as voice and video, as it reduces latency to a deterministic ten microseconds. AirFlow's new technology thus achieves deterministic performance and minimal jitter throughout the entire WLAN. When combined with AirFlow's unique ability to completely eliminate hand-offs between access points (APs), wireless quality-of-service applications are supported with high quality throughout the network.

"We continue to focus on innovations that eliminate the hurdles faced by network administrators looking to deploy wireless LANs," said Bob Machlin, AirFlow Networks president and CEO. "We first addressed the complexities of wireless LANs by eliminating co-channel interference and making WLANs easy to deploy and manage. Then, we implemented QoS techniques that leveraged our low-latency hand-offs capabilities to make high-quality voice over WLAN a reality. Now, we provide a breakthrough with scalability and performance, enabling customers to quickly and easily deploy our core wireless capabilities over very large scale wireless networks."

AirFlow has achieved this high performance and deterministic wireless networking by separating wireless packet handling into its two logical components:

    --  Real-time Hardware-based Packet Processing: "Fast-path"
        silicon operations on every wireless packet, including: deep
        packet lookup and inspection (e.g., protocol fields,
        client-air interface association, and encryption state);
        packet type classification; packet manipulation; and packet
        forwarding. All of these functions are performed at wire speed
        by a silicon-based implementation internal to the AirServer
        and AirSwitch.

        AirFlow's hardware-based packet processing features
        deterministic per-packet processing latency below 10
        microseconds -- without degradation even as the number of
        wireless clients scales to 10,000 -- with full packet lookup,
        inspection, classification, rewrite/transformation and
        forwarding. Even with the complex lookups/classification and
        rewrite required for wireless packet processing, AirFlow's
        solution is comparable to or better than Gigabit Ethernet
        switching chips that just perform silicon-based lookups and
        forwarding.

    --  Control and protocol management functions: Control and
        signaling functions such as protocol control updates and
        client mobility management are performed by the real-time
        operating system, which also manages the hardware-based
        forwarding and client/protocol related tables upon which
        lookups, classification, and transformation are based.

These capabilities allow AirFlow to provide scalable performance, but they also make it possible to update functionality with future enhancements without affecting the performance of the system. The hardware-based packet-processing engine can be enhanced through software upgrades to the real-time operating system.

New Security and Fault Tolerance Features Increase Flexibility

In addition to hardware-based wireless traffic processing, AirFlow's system now supports hardware-accelerated IPsec termination. With proven interoperability with several IPsec clients, including Microsoft, Cisco, and NetScreen, enterprise customers can deploy the same security measures for their wireless clients that are used to encrypt traffic across the public Internet. AirFlow's hardware-accelerated encryption also applies to WEP, dynamic WEP, and Wireless Protected Access (WPA).

AirFlow's new software release also provides 802.1x support for external authorization and authentication using services from Microsoft, Cisco, Funk, and Meetinghouse servers, including Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) support for Transport Layer Security (TLS), Tunneled Transport Layer Security (TTLS), and Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP). Together, these security functions give customers the flexibility to choose among a broad range of standards-based security measures.

All AirFlow networks WLANs support system-wide fault tolerance and redundancy. Multiple AirServers and/or AirSwitches can be deployed in an active/standby capacity to provide complete fail-over capabilities in case of a system failure or user error.

New AirHub 101 Supports Directional Antennas

AirFlow also announces the AirHub 101, a new AirHub that is capable of using external antennas as an alternative to the omni-directional antenna of the AirHub 100. External antennas can be connected to the AirHub 101 through two Terminal Node Controller (TNC) connectors, allowing users to utilize specialty directional or sectorized antennas from vendors such as HyperLink and MaxRad.

AirHub 100 and AirHub 101 Achieve Plenum Rating

AirFlow also announces that both the AirHub 100 and AirHub 101 have passed plenum certification testing for commercial, medical and health care applications.

About AirFlow Networks

AirFlow Networks designs and manufactures secure wireless LAN products that uniquely and elegantly solve enterprise deployment and scalability issues. AirFlow's solutions allow enterprises to build secure, high-performance, voice-over-IP (VoIP)-capable wireless LANs without the deployment, configuration, and management challenges inherent in other wireless LAN approaches. AirFlow solutions are fully compliant with industry standards and incorporate ten patent-pending innovations. AirFlow is a privately held company based in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit the company web site at www.airflownetworks.com.