WLAN History & Mist Cloud

WLAN History & Mist Cloud  

WLAN History

In the earliest Wi-Fi deployments, all access points (APs) were autonomous and required individual installation, configuration, and management. A minor change, such as the addition of a new wireless LAN (WLAN), required the reconfiguration of existing APs, which severely limited scalability. The next iteration simplified the AP hardware into lightweight APs, which were basically just radios that were configured and managed by a controller. Because the APs were so simple, they sent all traffic back to the controller for processing.

This was fine at lower density and data rates; however, the single controller became the bottleneck and also caused issue with scalability. A hybrid approach involving centralized controllers with more intelligent APs was eventually adopted. In this approach, the APs maintained enough intelligence to handle traffic forwarding (the data plane) while the management plane was centralized into the controller.