TurboCell

The TurboCell protocols for wireless LAN's were originally developed in the early 1990's to overcome some of the obstacles in using straight 802.3 protocols for outdoor Point-to-Multipoint environments. These previous generations (known as CellWave) pioneered high-performance outdoor radio and microwave links for wireless data networking. TurboCell and its earlier incarnations have been in use by OEM's and Resellers in their own systems around the world since the beginnings of high-bandwidth wireless.

As successive generations of radio hardware have become available, we have found that the basic principles applied in TurboCell still are needed to provide the highest performance, best security, and easiest management possible. TurboCell is designed to use existing radio hardware (such as IEEE 802.11) to meet the technical and business needs of wireless network operators, especially those providing Public Access Networks and outdoor Point-to-Multipoint solutions. In fact, one of TurboCell's greatest benefits is in its excellent Hidden Node Support, which is crucial for outdoor connections and public access providers.

The IEEE 802.11 standard was designed for wireless LANs, and as such works very well for private, wireless local area networks (WLAN). However, when employed in an outdoor Point-to-Multipoint or public access situation, the 802.11 standard needs some optimization to increase throughput, security, and manageability. Since the IEEE 802.11 standard was not designed for outdoor Point-to-Multipoint Wide Area Network (WAN) links, it suffers from significantly decreased performance in these topologies. However, TurboCell makes use of 802.11 radio technology to provide excellent throughput, security, and management on inexpensive hardware available as a standard worldwide.

TurboCell provides many of its advantages in the following main features:

	Superpacket Aggregation
	Adaptive Dynamic Polling
	Two-way Authentication
	Bandwidth Management
	Licensing Capabilities
	RADIUS Server Support (coming Q1 2000)

In addition to being available on a number of dedicated radio hardware platforms, TurboCell is available for desktop and laptop computers using the TurboCell PC Driver.