Analysis And Design Of Ap Phased Version Updating Function In Wlan System

With WLAN networks becoming more large and complex, the risk of its version updating is gradually increased. To reduce the risk of updating and the network failures caused by version problems, user needs to control the version updating of each AP. The original function of version updating can only update a single model of AP. To accomplish the function, user must configurate the AP’s version at first, then reboot it. AP will automatically download version from AC.While version updating achieved by this way is too simple to complete more complex functions. In actual operation, user usually updates partial APs in the first place, after ensuring the correction of the version, then updates all APs in the entire network. For example, updating a specified AP, but not updating the other APs with the same model, or updating some designated APs with different models without affecting the other AP. For the purpose of updating properly, the above situation will often appear in practition undoubtedly.The existing AP version updating functionality can not implements this feature, therefore a new solution of AP phased version updating emerges. The first part of the solution excute updating on some APs, when the updating meet the demand of user, then updating other APs. The updating method in stages could avoid unpredictable failures and reduce the risk during the updating process.In order to bring about this solution, the project changed the AP’s connection flow on AC, and designed three version updating switches to adapt to different operating granularities. The three version updating switches are configured under the system view, AP-GROUP view and AP view respectively, the descending priority order of the switches is AP view, AP-GROUP view and system view. When there are multiple version updating switches are turned on, only high-priority configuration can take effect. The switch under system view has two states which are on and off. The switches under AP-GROUP view and AP view have three states which are on, off and canceled. When the state of the switch is canceled, it will inherit the high-priority configuration.When the version updating switch is turned on, check the version number of AP’s firmware and software stored in AC, if they are not same, AP will comply version updating, if the are same, AP will connect AC directly. At the same time, in order to excute batch reboot after configured, the project added a new command that resboots all APs within AP-GROUP group.After such a design, we can realize the function that can not be realized before.