Cisco's ClearAir technology for Wireless LAN: my understandings

A whole new Wireless LAN security feature from Cisco.

Recently Cisco announced new Cisco Aironet 3500 Series Wireless LAN Access Point and emphasized a new "CleanAir" technology. What is "CleanAir" about? Why is is important? I share my understandings in this post.

• CleanAir identifies non-Wi-Fi radio sources
• CleanAir is mainly a hardware feature
• Classification patterns can be upgraded
• Limitations of CleanAir

CleanAir identifies non-Wi-Fi radio sources

In older Wireless LAN systems, non-Wi-Fi radio sources can only be classified as "non-Wi-Fi interferences" on your monitoring floor map, no matter whether they are Bluetooth devices, wireless cameras, game devices, or even cracked Access Points running non-Wi-Fi protocols.

As you can see, it could not be practical to remove them all (e.g. Bluetooth), and some of them are true threats to your network. We do need better tools to tell them apart. That is what Cisco's CleanAir built for.

CleanAir is mainly a hardware feature

Different radio sources can be identified by their special radio characteristics. We can imagine that analyzing radio signals requires a lot of real time computing power.

In fact, to implement CleanAir, Cisco put proprietary ASICs on the new Cisco Aironet 3500 series Access Points to do such computing intensive jobs.

That is why 3500s are more expensive, and older Access Points cannot have "CleanAir" simply by software upgrades because they do not have these new ASICs.

Classification patterns can be upgraded

Although analyzer computations are done by ASICs, classifiers is made of software (Cisco calls "Sensord"). If new non-Wi-Fi radio sources come out in the future, we can upgrade the software to get more classifier functions.

At this moment, CleanAir has 20 classifiers.

Limitations of CleanAir

CleanAir is focused on Unlicensed radio bands where 802.11 Wireless LAN runs only. Because of the complexity in nature, I do not expect Cisco to provide "full spectrum radio source identification" in near future.

Conclusion

Cisco's CleanAir technology is a very promising cure on non-Wi-Fi radio sources crowded in the Wi-Fi , the unsolved headaches of existing Wireless LAN networks. At this moment, I do not see any other competitor is ready on similar features to Cisco's CleanAir technology!