Hi All,
****Let me preface this question by saying, I know this may be a fools errand, best addressed through class management, etc. Please just speak to the feasibility and technical hurdles. There may be other applications with the same goal with different motivations that you would find more reasonable. bottom line, we're aware that this may be harder than it's worth, cause more problems that it solves, or prove indicative of a non-technical problem.****
We are a campus environment running CAPWAP on WLC/WISM with WCS behind it. We don't currently have WLA but I assume it may factor into some responses.
A request recently came to our CIO from a chairperson floating the idea of being able to controll wifi access in a classroom based on the whim of the instructor. Now, I recall this being one of the early worries of educational environments when 802.11 was first hitting the market in the early 2000s, but I don't see a lot of talk about it these days and this is the first time I've had a formal request.
What is envisioned is a functionality that would affect one room or geographic location at time and allow for simple manual control from that location. Something like a smart classroom with an AMX programmable touchpanel with a toggle that would effectively enable/disable the wireless connectivity for the occupants of the room.
I could see this being possible in the way that location-based asset tracking applications might work, with some sort of list based ACL/auth/assocation toggling for targeted clients being (those within the area defined by the control signal origin, Bldg/Room#) effectively disabled/enabled on demand.
I would imagine that WLA would be necessary as well as some form of API to handle the definition of zones and to link control messages to actions. Allowing clients to remain associated and even authenticated would also seem advantageous in easing the recovery of access.
Now, I know that something like this would require very good location tuning, which would be specifically challenging in our current environment of spotty non-surveyed AP placement, and it may require better AP coverage and placement/orientation, but is anyone currently doing something like this in their environment?
Are you aware of any turnkey products or configs? What might we need to consider or add to our infrastructure to enable something like this?
Further considerations:
*vertical axis (does WLA account well for this?) will killing a room on the 1st floor make it hard to avoid killing clients on floors above or below?
*API, does WLA have one? Does it have some standard XML/SOAP/SNMP interface for interacting with other systems openly?
I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this question, but searches proved fruitless. Perhaps the first to ask it in this context on this forum.
Thanks in advance for any thoughtful answers you can provide.
