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Now that 802.11n has been adopted by the Wi-Fi Alliance for interoperability testing, the next big thing is to look at architecture for 802.11n roll-outs. We've been teaching about the "hybrid" architecture for almost a year now. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means the use of intelligent APs (though not necessarily considered autonomous or lightweight) with WLAN controllers used for control and management traffic (often called the control and management planes). The data traffic (often called the data plane) is sent directly to its destination rather than tunneled through the controller. This really good news for QoS (a total nightmare in a lightweight AP scenario), really good news for throughput (no bottlenecks at the WLAN controller), and really tricky news for VLAN deployment.

With the data plane being taken out of the controller, each AP will need a trunk pipe to the edge Ethernet switch. Oy vey...going back to that again won't be fun.

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