Carnegie Mellon West expands Wi-Fi for mobility research

Computerworld - Carnegie Mellon West, a graduate school in Mountain View, Calif., is launching a Mobility Research Center on its campus that will include an upgrade to its Wi-Fi network for education and research.

The campus, a branch of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, specializes in graduate programs for more than 100 students enrolled in software engineering, software management and related fields. The West Coast campus expects to increase the number of students and faculty in the fall and needs an increase in capacity and performance for Wi-Fi, said Martin Griss, associate dean for research, in an e-mail.

"Our goal is to provide a much more extensive and flexible wireless infrastructure, both within the buildings and outside," Griss said. Because the campus, opened in 2002, has had a long relationship with Motorola Inc. and its Symbol Technologies Inc. division, Motorola is providing a new RFS7000 wireless LAN switch as well as about a dozen access points for 802.11a/b/g. Griss said there are plans to upgrade to faster wireless 802.11n at some point, but he could not be more specific.

While the campus is relatively small, its graduate students and faculty researchers can be expected to put the Motorola technology to a robust test. The campus will incorporate radio frequency identification equipment and may add "other wireless capabilities" in the Wi-Fi network, Griss said. The campus already supports wireless cell phones, wireless sensors, Bluetooth and Zigbee, in addition to RFID, he said.

The network will be used to support new capabilities in location-based computing and will enable students and researchers to experiment with the wireless infrastructure, Griss said. Nokia Corp. and SAP AG also provide the campus with mobile research support, he said.

In a statement, Motorola described the RFS7000 as the industry's only wireless LAN switch that can integrate Wi-Fi, mesh wireless and RFID. Motorola said the switch will eventually also support WiMax, but the company did not detail further plans.