This has made Ethernet unsuitable for high reliability, time-critical applications such as avionics systems. However, the topology of Ethernet, by design, allows for multiple broadcasts, collisions and retransmissions. The most popular of these standards in the commercial realm is Ethernet. 2011)ĭuring this same time period, other communications standards were developed that greatly increased the throughput capability, but lacked the reliability and determinism necessary for real-time avionics systems to operate.
Airbus Military’s A400M multi-role transport aircraft has completed a series of tests to validate the lowest speed at which it can take off. The bus operates at 1 Mbps, and is dual redundant for reliable operation. MIL-STD-1553 is a time division multiplexed command and response bus with a bus controller initiating all communications on the bus. This has proven to be a very effective method, and is still in widespread use today.
This is why there is an interest in connections higher than one gigabit per second between access points and switches.Since the 1970’s, military aircraft avionics systems have communicated via the MIL-STD-1553 bus. Therefore, a 1 GbE access port could now possibly be the bottleneck to performance for Wi-Fi users. With the advent of 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) and now 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6), an AP has the potential of more than one-gigabit throughput. This is because the AP was the limiting factor to performance. This means connecting to a switch with a one-gigabit port was adequate, as anything faster wouldn't make any practical difference. As we noted earlier, this was sufficient to support 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4) since the total possible throughput via a wireless access point was below one gigabit per second. Today, most enterprise-class switches have one-gigabit access ports. Theoretically, the PHYs will support almost up to 10 gigabits per second, although practical limits will ultimately mean somewhat slower throughput. The next generation of 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) APs have begun shipping in the latter half of 2018. Most 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) APs are equipped with two 1 GbE ports, with some featuring 2.5 GbE ports. 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) access points can hit up to 2.3 gigabits per second, though the practical limit is a little less. This means 1 GbE access ports were more than capable of handling all the data that earlier generations of APs could push out. With prior generations of Wi-Fi, 802.11 (A, B, G & N) APs could only support up to about 600 megabits, though in real-world environments they couldn't process more than 200 or 300 megabytes per second (throughput).
Concurrently, there is an increased dependence on wireless and cloud-based applications that lead to more total data being transferred via wireless access points. More and more users, each with devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones, are using the latest Wi-Fi standards for higher performance. Rather, a bottleneck is typically due to internet connection speed, or the response time of an application, application, user or device.Īs the demand for Wi-Fi increases, so does the need for higher aggregate performance from the access points. For most applications, the connection to the switch is not the limiting factor to performance. For most users and devices, 1 GbE delivers adequate performance. This is because 1 GbE is standard for almost all end-user devices, including desktops, printers, voice over IP (VoIP) phones and wireless access points (APs). Today, most enterprise-class switches feature 1 GbE access ports. Lastly, we’ll conclude this series with a summary of Ruckus’ multi-gigabit portfolio.Ī decade ago, the predominant Ethernet switches moved to 1 GbE ports, superseding Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), which was the previous prevailing standard. We’ll also explore multi-gigabit standards and cabling, along with specific use cases, considerations and when multi-gigabit technology should be adopted. In this series, we’ll discuss multi-gigabit technology and take a closer look at why organizations will ultimately require more than one-gigabit ethernet at the edge. Advances in wireless access points and Ethernet switch technologies are driving connectivity at the edge beyond one gigabit to multi-gigabit.