The wireless network system on Niigata University campus installed in 2007 has worked well. Below is an overview of how university members use this system; wireless network computers are assigned global IP addresses by a DHCP server and any HTTP communications are redirected to a web authentication page in order to authenticate the members. The system contributed to reducing the management burden of network operations because of easy tracking of users and their computers. The number of smartphone and tablet users increased very rapidly at recent Niigata University, and since about 2012, we recognized a serious problem that the system run out of global IP addresses for being assigned to wireless network computers. Since in our wireless network design, always-on wireless network devices were assigned global IP addresses before authentication, they might have occupied the addresses without authentication. It followed that the other members who really wanted to use wireless network could not access the network. In order to solve the shortage of global IP addresses with maintenance of easy tracking of users,we improved the existing system to assign wireless network computers which have passed user authentication with global IP addresses using dynamic VLAN assignments. In this paper, we detail an overview of the improved wireless network system and finally, evaluate the benefits of our system from the result of network operations.
View full abstract