Airvine University Video Series
Session 1 – Episode 3 (4:10 min.)
A bit about who we are, I told you about the problem we’re out there to solve.
I’ve even introduced a little bit of the product, so you understand the WaveTunnel nodes and the software that drives the WaveTunnel deployments, but let’s talk turkey–let’s get into actually how you’re going to use these nodes and how it can be deployed the simplest deployment.
This is what we call a spur, a point to point to point to point, and in fact there’s no limit to how many point to point to point nodes you can string out. It’s really based on the application tolerance for latency. Each hop has a 2 millisecond latency. If you went five nodes out you would have four hops that would be 8 milliseconds of latency. So in the very beginning the root node is tied into your Layer 2, your switch, your router, your internet connection.
From there the first WaveTunnel node will be connected to the second WaveTunnel node, and as I mentioned there’s two radios in each node so you can see that this node one can simultaneously send & receive traffic to the root node, while it’s also sending and receiving traffic to the second node. Maybe on this first node you’ve got a Wi-Fi access point hanging off, and this is powered by the PoE port from the WaveTunnel node. Maybe on node 2 you might need an IP camera, a 4K surveillance camera, or you may need another Wi-Fi. You could have cameras, Wi-Fi, anything that has an Ethernet jack can be plugged in and carried and back hauled by the WaveTunnel network.
Pretty simple, nothing too complicated there. Let’s look at a ring topology. The dual ring topology allows for counter rotating rings, because remember we’re transmitting and receiving in each direction simultaneously, the idea here is if you need extra availability or resiliency then you deploy your WaveTunnel Network into a ring format, that way if there’s a connection lost, say somebody puts that steel cabinet up in between you, anything that can break that link, the ring will detect it and send the traffic in the opposite direction. [This is] very similar to the ethernet ring protection protocol that many of you are familiar with, we’re just doing it wirelessly.
WaveTunnel around a corner; So how is it that you bend around corners, Dave? Well that’s a good question. So what you can see here is the top WaveTunnel node is connected to these four Wi-Fi access points. It is now in the corridor and is shooting into the corner where there’s another WaveTunnel node at a 45 degree angle. So you have a 45 degree angle coming into this middle node and a 45 degree angle going out effectively making a 90 degree turn around that corner. If you wanted to, and you thought it was viable, and we do have a Vine calculator [to calculate this,] you could even try shooting this top left one directly to the top of bottom right one. Maybe it works, but if it doesn’t you can always come back and do the bending around the corner.
Are there limitations with regards to the applications that you can support on this network?
No there are no limitations–if it has an Ethernet cable and it can plug into our box and we can carry the traffic. [With the exception of] one we do not support today, 5G small cells, because there are timing protocols. But we will be releasing a version of the product that does support things such as SyncE and 1588, so next year we’ll be able to do back haul on 5G small cells which has been a big market demand.
I love the the setup from a cell phone concept–do you just scan the barcode of the product and then the QR code? Yeah so that’s how you do the product registration. Product registration is something we didn’t get into but it’s very very simple, every WaveTunnel that shipped has a QR code on the box you scan that QR code with your phone it will take you to a short form to fill out some basic information and you’ll have registered your WaveTunnel node with Airvine.