With video increasingly being used in organizations, Meru Networks says it has found a way to optimize a wireless LAN for delivering high-quality video over IEEE 802.11n networks. All wireless networks can suffer unpredictable loss rates that can impair video quality. Meru says its Video Services Module (ViSM) module solves this by applying application-aware optimization techniques to Web streaming and real-time multicast video. The software module, to be available in June, is an add-on to Meru's System Director software. For a network with 100 wireless access points, the module is priced at US$7,995.
According to Vaduvur Bharghavan, Meru's chief technology officer, the module takes advantage of the company's virtualized WLAN architecture, which gives every client device its own dedicated wireless port. Each client gets its own copy of the multicast application traffic, delivered at the highest possible data rate and unaffected by the transmission or power-save behavior of other
clients, he said in a news release. It also synchronizes the voice and video components of a video stream, adapting the delivery of each frame based on its importance to the application. Higher-priority MPEG-4 AVC/H.264-marked frames are transmitted with greater assurance of reliability and timeliness, the company claimed.