Cisco is set to merge Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB) and Wi-Fi functionalities in its access points (APs). At the Mobility Field Day event, the company announced that starting 2025, URWB and Wi-Fi will be supported in the same access points whereby both functionalities can be simultaneously used on the same device.
The update came just days after Cisco issued end-of-sale notice for all its LoRaWAN products.
As of today, URWB is deployed on a separate infrastructure comprising its own set of APs and management planes. This requires customers to maintain a parallel overlay to Wi-Fi. With this new update, both the solutions will be on one infrastructure with reduced footprint and overhead.
“The point of all of it is to offer the functionality to customers without needing to double the infrastructure or have two parallel infrastructures of access points and management planes,” said Dave Benham, senior product manager.
Optionally, users can keep using their current URWB architecture should they prefer it. Cisco will continue support for URWB in the usual way. “Think of this as an additional functionality for your existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, not necessarily something we’re forcing you to do.”
Set to be released as a software update, the new feature will provide unified software image and management platforms.
URWB and Wi-Fi images will not be required to boot separately, said Benham. “You boot it one way or the other. It’s only one boot.”
The feature can be enabled on a radio or an access point on both local and Flexconnect modes. “It supports both modes of operation,” he told.
All APs will be managed by the Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) for now, but more options will be supported in the future.
“For cases where you have an IW9165 for example, as the mobile device, that device will be managed by the WLC as well.” This will give users a single point of control to monitor and manage all APs.
The joint solution will include all URWB features – reliable fiber-like wireless connectivity, sub-millisecond low latency, with the added ability to run all critical applications on the same APs.
For fixed infrastructures, URWB supports Point-To-Point, Point-To-Multipoint, mesh and a mix of topologies, and offers zero loss roaming for mobile architectures.
“Have you ever wished that your wireless devices could roam seamlessly with zero packet loss or that you had less latency and jitters so that your critical wireless devices could have redundant connections to multiple APs?”
URWB was created to overcome the reliability limitations of wireless. Its signature “make-before-break” feature enables connections to be moved reliably between APs without service drops.
The Multipath Operations (MPO) technology allows users to route high-priority packets through redundant paths. URWB sends duplicate traffic to two different APs so that if connection is interrupted on one, packets are not lost.
“Basically you can decide which traffic is important enough that you want it redundant,” Benham said. “It doesn’t mean that your entire infrastructure is redundant necessarily. You have certain things that you want to promote the redundancy for,” he added.
Currently, Cisco URWB addresses a spectrum of mobile and fixed use cases in the sectors of manufacturing, rail, mining and smart cities. The new update, however, will not support all of them right out the gate.
“We aren’t going to support all of the elaborate use cases that URWB supports today. There will be a few that we can’t support initially, but we’re moving to that parity of having all of the features there, and I think a lot of use cases will be satisfied with the initial launch.”
Benham named manufacturing, and campus and smart cities as the key use cases that the new update will primarily support, specifically automated ground vehicle (AGV), video surveillance, building to building connectivity, and roadways and intersections connectivity.
Cisco AP models that will add support for URWB next year include older models like C9130 and C9124, as well as recent ones like CW9178, CW9176I and CW9176D1.
Wi-Fi 8 strongly prioritizes reliability, and promises to bring a much-improved roaming experience with multi-AP coordination, but with the standard still in development, it may be a few years before it sees the light of day.
“Wi-Fi 8 may have some things that can make it a bit more graceful, but it may not be in the initial release,” Benham predicted.
For more, be sure to watch Cisco’s presentations from Mobility Field Day on the Tech Field Day website.
