Cisco Cisco Aironet 1522 Lightweight Outdoor Mesh Access Point White Paper
Solution White Paper
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broadband communications to and from the mobile network. Municipal workers are now
empowered to communicate in real-time to command centers for day-to-day operations or
emergency situations. Together, The Cisco outdoor wireless and mobile network solutions provide
transit agencies with a foundation for offering new services that benefit customers and generate
additional revenue.
A Secure, High-Availability Mesh Network
With recent increased terrorism and emergency alerts since 9/11, government agencies have
placed a tremendous amount of focus on having a secure, high- performance, and highly reliable
network. The goal of this new focus is to help ensure that law enforcement personnel will always
be able to communicate with each other in times of emergency.
The Cisco Outdoor Wireless Networking solution allows organizations to build secure, high-
availability wired and wireless LANs with fault-tolerant configurations. With redundant and self-
healing capability implemented in the mesh network, the outdoor wireless network can have
backup access points that will immediately take over in the rare event that a primary access point
fails. The mesh network self-heals itself by rerouting traffic away from the failed access point.
For downtown areas where there are many users using the network, government agencies may
wish to deploy additional access points to balance out the data traffic going into the existing
access points. The load-balancing features of Cisco Aironet solutions can be utilized to help
ensure that the different access points work as a system, evenly distributing bandwidth among the
various users and optimizing performance in real time.
Cisco Integrated Security Systems and Cisco Secure Wireless offer the most comprehensive set
of feature-rich security services—security services that can be flexibly deployed with the Cisco
Outdoor Wireless Networking solution. The Cisco Secure Wireless offers wireless LAN
authentication and encryption features, closely paralleling the security services in a wired LAN.
Cisco Aironet solutions support all IEEE802.11i, WPA, and WPA2 security schemes. They provide
a strong security mechanism for protecting wireless network. The wireless mesh platform also
uses AES encryption to protect data transmitting on the backhaul so that information are securely
sent over the airwave.
In addition, X.509 certificates is used to prevent rogue access point from joining the network. The
network administrator will have a list of all the X.509 certificates of mesh access points that are
allowed to be on the network. Any access points with X.509 certificate that does not match the
ones granted by the network adminstrator will not be allowed to join the network.
For users looking to provide a seamless security framework between radio networks, an added
layer of security can be achieved through the use of virtual private network (VPN) solutions. Cisco
VPN solutions meet the highest security requirement of the federal government, providing strong
triple Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption and authentication through digital certificates,
one-time password tokens, and pre-shared keys to further protect sensitive information transmitted
over wireless networks.
A recognized leader in network security issues and solutions, Cisco believes that no single point of
defense can guarantee data privacy and protection; for true network security, an end-to-end
approach is required across both the wired and wireless LAN, from the network core to the
network edge.