Matt Perry, technical director at Aerohive reckons that wireless network controllers were not put in place for management reasons: “In any enterprise wireless network of any reasonable size, there will be multiple controllers – another layer of complexity: Access Points (APs), controllers and a separate management system. We see it as inevitable that controllers are not the correct route for wi-fi networks.”

Aerohive wi-fi does away with the need for the “Fat Controller” opting, instead, for groups of its HiveAPs or “hives” that share control information between their members to enable control functions such as security, QoS and coordinated RF management. Adam Conway, product marketing vp, says: “It provides all the benefits of a controller-based architecture without the overhead of a layer of controllers.”

The emergence of Aerohive might well herald a new breed of WLAN player similar to the way the likes of Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks broke through delivering 10/100 Ethernet while the rest were working with only 10 Mbps Ethernet: “This is disruptive technology that does away with the controller bottleneck to performance and we can demonstrate that 802.11 architectures based on a/b/g don’t scale up in the same way as 11n,” says Conway.

Aerohive, currently finding success among universities, delivers the over-the-air component via what it calls Dynamic Airtime Scheduling, released in January 2009. It allocates scarce airtime resources among the clients according to what is appropriate for the device and the application: “We are not starving the slow devices, but we enable the quick devices to get things done before re-allocating airtime to the slower one,” says Perry.

“Our competitors are way behind us, so I feel our advanced architecture will mean we’ll be uncontested for at least a couple of years,” adds Perry.