User's Manual
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antennas. The unit operating at the center of the star topology plays the role of Master and is in
charge of coordinating communications to and from the other units that thus act as Slaves. As a
result, the hidden and exposed terminal problems are eliminated by the centralized FluidMAX
MAC protocol that supports up to 500 Mb/s maximum throughput
2
.
By reducing the number of
slaves, the supported rate per slave can be increased provided that the sum of the throughput
requirements of the slaves is lower than or equal to 150 Mb/s.
Figure 4.4: Point-To-Multipoint Network Architecture
FluidMAX is fully automatic and integrated within the mesh architecture. By continuously
monitoring the network topology, FM units are able to automatically select whether to operate the
FluidMAX MAC protocol or remain in the initial mesh operating mode. Consequently, no
additional configuration is needed to enable the FluidMAX features because the communication
protocol is automatically chosen by the FluidMAX protocol based on the detected network topology.
4.4 FLUIDITY LAYOUT
4.5 Prodigy
Firmware versions 6.5 or above feature the innovative Prodigy 2.0 MPLS-based protocol. The
protocol is a quantum leap in terms of performance with respect to its predecessor Prodigy 1.0.
Prodigy 2.0 features include Fluidity (through software plug-in), traffic engineering and advanced
QoS. Prodigy 2.0 is NOT compatible with Prodigy 1.0. The protocol selection can be done, for
back-compatibility, using the Web GUI in the Local Configuration page (see Section 7.6 for more
details). No mixed operation of Prodigy 1.0 and Prodigy 2.0 are allowed. In case of expansion of
current network deployments two options are available:
1. Setting the newly added units with Firmware 6.5 or above to operate in Prodigy 1.0.
2. Upgrading the previously deployed units with a Firmware 6.5 or above and set them to
operate in Prodigy 2.0.
!
We recommend option 1 if there is no specific issue in the network.
2
We assume the default channel width of 80 MHz