Meru’s reliability, ease of deployment, and ability to support a high density of users made for peaceful and secure wireless diplomacy

London, Nov. 16, 2009 – Over 5,000 world leaders, foreign ambassadors and international journalists at this year’s NATO summit in Strasbourg communicated using a wireless infrastructure provided by Meru Networks. The buzzed-about fourth-generation wireless vendor was chosen because of its ability to handle a high density of users while delivering impeccable quality of service and complete reliability.

According to Serge Hervy, responsible for events at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the most urgent requirement for the summit’s wireless LAN was reliability – especially with such an unusually high density of users. The WLAN would have to support up to 4,500 simultaneous Wi-Fi connections, both on the internet and via an internal VPN. Complicating matters, only 4,000 square meters were dedicated for 2,000 journalists, and the delegations were scattered over the buildings of the summit, which created an obstacle for ubiquitous coverage.

Summit organisers had to choose between various third-generation “microcell” vendors and Meru Networks, a pioneering fourth-generation “virtual cell” vendor. Third-generation WLANs from legacy vendors use a microcell approach, which assigns different radio channels to many small, adjacent access point cells to ensure that no two APs use the same radio channel in the same place. This technique requires precise and time-consuming channel planning and AP power adjustments; it is also known to create problems with contention, co-channel interference and quality of service.

By contrast, Meru’s unique virtual-cell architecture selects a single channel for use by all access points enterprise-wide. Additional channels can be layered as more capacity is required. This approach removes co-channel interference, even with the volatile IEEE 802.11n standard, and eliminates the need for a detailed site survey at conception and during the WLAN’s lifecycle for adds/moves and changes.

“Meru’s fourth-generation virtual cell technology was the only solution on the market that could match the summit’s reliability and user-density needs“ explained Eric Thomas, director of operations, Altius.

Meru partner Altius deployed three Meru wireless LANs comprising a total of 80 access points and six controllers rented from Léni, a company specialising in high-tech equipment rental for big events. Six engineers were able to complete the ambitious deployment in less than two weeks. To guarantee bandwidth to every Wi-Fi user, the networks built of multiple virtual cells were configured to support both 802.11a/b/g, 802.11n and to offer a bandwidth greater than 1,6Gbps, making Meru’s platform the newest and fastest Wi-Fi enterprise solution on the market. Introducing slower clients can dramatically reduce the overall throughput of an access point; however, Meru's APs are embedded with an Airtime Fairness algorithm that provides equal access for all clients regardless of access methods (e.g., 802.11 a, b, g or n) or speed. In the 2009 Novarum report ("Enterprise 802.11n Wireless LAN Access Point Performance Benchmark"), both Cisco's and Aruba's airtime fairness degraded as client density increased; only Meru’s improved.

David Kelly, Meru Vice President of International Sales, said, "Meru Networks via its partner Altius was honoured to facilitate wireless communication for NATO’s sixtieth anniversary. We plan to continue developing upon our already cutting-edge technology in the years ahead to ensure that Meru customers will always enjoy the most peaceful, secure and hassle-free wireless experiences possible.”

By providing the wireless networking infrastructure for the NATO 60th Anniversary Summit, Meru Networks – and its innovative virtual cell technology – has played a role in technological history.