Synad Technologies announced a hardware/software reference design for a dual-band, remotely-configurable, Linux-based wireless access point based on its Mercury WLAN chipset. The company claims a unique (patent pending) “band-interleaving” mode of the new “AgileAP” wireless access point reference design is unique in its ability to support all 802.11 standards concurrently from a single wireless radio –… including both high speed (5GHz) 802.11a clients and 2.4GHz legacy devices.

Synad said the reference design's software stack is based on a standard Linux kernel and leverages the mode-switching capabilities of the Mercury chipset to distribute data packets across multiple bands using a single radio. Working within the IEEE 802.11 WLAN protocol, the system schedules when data packets are exchanged in a manner that enables a single-radio access point to simultaneously support a mix of 2.4GHz and 5GHz clients, maintaining interoperability with third-party clients, the company said. According to Synad, the design supports advanced security standards such as Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and includes hardware encryption acceleration to maximize data throughput while operating securely.

The AgileAP developers kit includes Mercury radio cards, AgileAP software, a complete Linux based access point reference suite (including TCP/IP networking stack and bridging capability), a Linux kernel, and an x86 development platform, the company said.

 
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