Edu-leaders

The PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh was established in 1921 as Mugalpura Engineering College at Lahore (now in Pakistan). Since then it has not only changed names but also changed location several times.The college shifted to its present campus in Chandigarh, in 1953. In 2003, it got the “Deemed University” status and in 2009 it got renamed as PEC University of Technology. In 1994 the National Foundation of Engineers adjudged it as the best technical college in India.

Spread over an area of 146 acres, the campus is divided into zones like hostels, main college building, administration block, residential complex for staff and faculty, and a shopping centre. The institute had marginal network connectivity to the faculty residences. The only choice available was ADSL connectivity. As most of the faculty members used laptops at home, wireless connectivity was required.

The institute wanted to provide a secure Wi-Fi service inside the campus and to perform experiments on advanced security features like TKIP, AES, WEP, 802.1x , WPA, 802.11i, WPA-PSK and 802.11i-PSK.

Business Challenge
Traditional wireless connectivity through Access Points (APs) required a wired backbone and placement of switches and laying down cables. This was not possible and desirable, as the buildings of the institute are spread over a wide area. It was thus challenging to provide wireless connectivity which did not require laying of cables.

Solution
The university decided to set up a Wireless Mesh Network, for a robust, secure and easy connectivity. It selected Proxim for the deployment after evaluating several products and determining that adding centralised WLAN switches was cost prohibitive.

The deployment was planned well in advance. The locations of the wireless mesh points were decided after conducting a site survey. The Mesh Networking was done using the Orinico Mesh APs which support structured Mesh Networking. Proxim’s Orinoco AP-4000MR-LR and AP-4900MR-LR products that could provide high performance access were used in the deployment.

“The installation of the Wi-Fi mesh nodes had to be done without the 24 hours power supply that is usually provided by street light poles.This technical challenge was overcome by utilising Wi-Fi mesh nodes that are powered by Power over Ethernet (PoE),” said Nishchal Batra, sales director, Asia and Middle East, Proxim Wireless.

In the architecture of the deployment, a Proxim Wi-Fi Mesh device is connected to a master switch, and multiple other Proxim Wi-Fi mesh devices are connected to the initial mesh portal in first hop or maximum second hop. Multiple SSIDs mapped to different VLAN features are used to segregate students, faculty and Guest level access. Secure links to other APs are created using secure AES encryption and authentication. Orinoco Mesh Creation Protocol then determines the most efficient path through the mesh, taking into account the traffic load, link speed, signal strength, number of hops and other parameters.

This solution had following benefits:

Business Value
According to Professor Divya Bansal, chief investigator of the project, the Wireless Mesh Network was required to be deployed as a part of a sponsored project from the Indian government to perform experiments relating to the draft 802.11s standard, and conducting real time experiments. “With this mesh, we are able to deploy secure, scalable and reliable wireless connectivity, ” she said. The Rs 4.6 million research project is funded by the department of Information Technology in the Ministry of Communications & IT.

“In addition to serving as an experimental testbed, the University’s wireless mesh network is also being used for providing wireless connectivity to the faculty residential areas of PEC University of Technology. Such networks can be replicated for other solutions such as wireless video surveillance in nearby cities, WISPs, and city-wide wireless networks,” said Dr Sanjeev Sofat, professor and head of the department of Computer Science and Engineering, PEC University of Technology.

According to Sofat, the project shall help in identifying both design and development of secure mesh networks and will help in developing better security approaches. The scope of this project will be primarily to secure the environment of wireless mesh networks so that the city wide networks can be securely designed, deployed and used for information sharing.