CAPWAP Taxonomy Recommendations
Cisco Systems
The IETF's CAPWAP working group has documented various product architectures and has categorized the Centralized WLAN Architectures into two main buckets: Split and Local MAC. While the document contains very relevant and useful information, what it does is list the architectural variants of these two buckets, but does not unambiguously define either the Split MAC or Local MAC architectures. In order for CAPWAP to be successful, it is crucial for the protocol evaluation team, and the working group, to agree on unambiguous terminology to describe these architectures. This document proposes terminology to unambiguously describe the relevant architectures found in the taxonomy document, for the purpose of initiating a discussion within the working group and to allow the protocol evaluation work to come to a fruitful conclusion. We conclude in this document that the architectures are very similar and could be supported via a single protocol.