Cisco 802.11a/b/g Outdoor Mesh Access Point for Hazardous Locations, FCC configuration 54 Mbit/s

Cisco® Aironet® 1522 Lightweight Outdoor Mesh Access Point (Figure 1) enables cost-effective and scalable deployment of a secure outdoor wireless LANs. The Cisco Aironet 1522 is designed for municipal Wi-Fi deployments for public access, public safety, or managed services, and for enterprise campus outdoor Wi-Fi extensions.

Self-Configuring and Self-Healing Mesh
The Cisco Aironet 1522 mesh access point can be installed anywhere power is available, without the need for a network connection. Intelligent wireless routing is based on the Cisco's Adaptive Wireless Path Protocol (AWPP), which is designed specifically for wireless environments. AWPP enables a remote access point to dynamically optimize the best route to the connected network within the mesh, mitigate interference and helping ensure high network capacity.
Deployment and management costs for the Cisco Aironet 1522 are reduced through support of zero-configuration deployments and through the ability of the access points to self-heal in response to interference or outages. The mesh access point can act as a relay node and can associate 2.4GHz clients at the same time.
The Cisco Aironet 1522 has a dedicated radio for the backhaul and another radio for local access, allowing the mesh network to maximize use of the total available channels. This results in more capacity than is available with solutions that use only a single radio. When more capacity is needed, additional sectors can be enabled-for example, by provisioning a network connection to additional access points. The mesh dynamically re-optimizes itself when this is done

Zero-Touch Configuration
Using the Cisco Lightweight Access Point Protocol (LWAPP) features, the Cisco Aironet 1522 mesh access point can discover its LWAPP controller and automatically download the correct configuration and software for its role in the wireless mesh network.

Cisco Adaptive Wireless Path Protocol (AWPP)
Wireless mesh networks have unique features and requirements, and to address these features and requirements Cisco has built a new protocol that allows each node to determine its neighbor or parent intelligently, choosing the optimal path toward the controller. Unlike traditional routing protocols, AWPP takes RF details into account.
AWPP automatically determines the best path back to the LWAPP controller by calculating the cost of each path in terms of signal strength and number of hops. After the path is established, AWPP continuously monitors the best path conditions and changes routes if necessarily to optimize performance. AWPP also performs a smoothing function by signaling condition information to ensure that the ephemeral nature of RF environments does not impact network stability.

Robust Embedded Security
A core component of the Cisco Unified Wireless Solution is the use of X.509 certificates and AES encryption for LWAPP transactions. This X.509 and AES encryption is embedded into the wireless mesh solution with LWAPP transactions and by AES encrypting all traffic between mesh nodes. The complete packet path is from the Cisco controller to the access points and eventually to the users. The controller encapsulates user packets and forwards them to the correct roof top access point (RAP) over Ethernet. Roof top access point has a wired connection to the back haul and it wirelessly connect mesh access points (MAPs) at locations without a wired connection. RAP then encrypts the user data packets and transfers them over the backhaul. Data packets may travel through multiple mesh access points before reaching the destination MAP. After receiving the encrypted user data, the destination MAP decrypts them and sends them over the air to the client using the encryption method specified by the client.
For mutual authentication, Extensible Authentication Protocol / Pre-Shared Key (EAP / PSK) is now supported between the mesh access point nodes.