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There is an ever-increasing demand for more functionality and complexity to be added to wireless access points.

To address these requirements, systems designers must rely on hardware implemented features like dedicated programmable classification, hardware-based queuing and QoS with inter-layer optimization; these provide superior performance versus software-based implementations and also provide tight latency bounds in serving low power clients.

In this article, we aim to propose an innovative architecture that offloads the host processor from most of the per-packet functions across the different OSI layers, and thus allows it to serve other system specific functions and to reduce power consumption within existing PoE budgets.

The Wi-Fi module is the data acquisition point for the Wi-Fi AP and is an optimal place for deploying the functionality described above. It scales with these performance needs, eliminates unnecessary data forwarding (tunnelling), and can provide a unified policy framework to implement the much-needed QoS and short latency for low power clients. The proposed architecture is suitable for concurrent dual-band in single Wireless LAN modules (supported by the existing Ensigma RPUs) or to support two different Wireless LAN cards for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.

The firewall and QoS rules need to be applied on the fly on all the packets at around 1 Gbps, and the firewall rules would be changing based on client mobility etc.

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