West Point unwired: the Military Academy at West Point continues to lead the way in high-tech curriculum with wireless classroom networking - Cover St

When the class of 2007-1,200 first-year cadets--arrives at the Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 2003, one of the first tasks they will do is pick up their "cadet computers." That has been the drill for nearly two decades, but this year's cadet computer will have a new feature that extends West Point's legacy of being at the forefront in leveraging technology in education: wireless networking capability for classroom connectivity to support interactive, student-centered learning.

Having overcome serious concerns about the security issues surrounding wireless networking, West Point is ready to leverage a powerful educational resource that fully integrates the use of students' notebook computers into the in-class curriculum.

Not at all new to the value of computers in education, West Point has been issuing PCs, termed cadet computers, to incoming first-year cadets since 1986, and its curriculum has included Internet access since 1987. Upgrading is a constant at West Point--each student's workstation area in the barracks has been wired for local area and broadband networking since 1987. In 2002, those connections were upgraded to 100 Mbps, and the cabling that makes up the network includes a future-ready fiber-optic strand, so that taking it to the next level--Gigabit connectivity to each barracks workstation--will be easy

Col. Donald Welch, West Point's associate dean for information and educational technology, and a team of IT managers experimented with wireless networking for five years before they embarked on a project to deploy it Academy-wide. Topping the list of concerns that needed to be overcome before deployment could even be considered was security.

SOFTWARE SOLVES SECURITY CONCERN

Welch's team needed to find a wireless architecture that met the Academy's mission-critical security requirements: they found that in the WirelessWall Software Suite from Cranite Systems. "We spent two years, and looked at about seven different solutions before we chose Cranite," says Welch.

"Cranite was the most secure. It offers a firewall between the wireless and wired network enclaves; it provides mutual authentication that prevents rogue access points; it encrypts the data and IP headers using FIPS-140 certified encryption (AES); and it provides strong cryptographic integrity protection using a FIPS-140 certified algorithm.

"We found that the solution also put less strain on our client CPUs because it employs the AES FIPS-140 encryption algorithm, which is more efficient than the alternative 3DES," adds Welch. "In the end, it was the most economical solution of those that met our minimum security requirements."

Once it had settled on the wireless firewall solution, Welch's team continued to pursue wireless classroom connectivity by evaluating 802.11a wireless networking products from vendors in a series of tests that looked at bandwidth, latency and signal propagation. After the testing phase, West Point determined that SMC Network's 802.11a wireless access points and adapters met the Military Academy's requirements.

West Point considered all of the options for wireless networking: 802.11a, 802.11b and the draft 802.11g, before deciding on an 802.11a solution. The 802.11a option won out because it provides greater bandwidth in two ways: more band-width per access point and closer grouping of access points, so fewer students share a given chunk of bandwidth.

Smaller cells with more access points in a given area and the greater number of channels available on 802.11 a--eight vs. the three for 802.11b--all make for a more efficient network. 802.11g had two key deficits: the standard was not ready, and it carries the inherent disadvantages of 802.11b with respect to the number of non-overlapping channels.

BANDWIDTH A PRIORITY

Welch says that 802.11a matched requirements for a wireless solution in security, range and speed. "Since we're using this as an active part of classroom learning, we need bandwidth," he says. "One thousand cadets starting English classes at 7:30 each morning will all connect at the same time to access the same activities and information from multiple classrooms. 802.11a provides more bandwidth per access point than 802.11b, and its smaller cells means that we can effectively divide access, roughly by classroom. There's less overlap."

In choosing a specific 802.11a solution, West Point evaluated products from several vendors. In addition to testing bandwidth, latency and signal propagation in varied locations around campus, including some especially odd-shaped rooms, West Point's evaluation also tested the products for ease of setup and maintenance. The final considerations were price and supportability.

The price range was huge--the most expensive solution carried a price tag five times that of the least expensive. SMC's products were ultimately installed because their performance equaled or bettered all of the others, according to Welch, and due to supportability, as well as initial cost, were the economical choice