American Airlines Center Flys High with Centralized Wi-Fi from Aruba

American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, is considered by many to be one of the most technologically-advanced sports and entertainment venues in the world. Co-owner Mark Cuban recently spent over $281 million to renovate AA Center, the home of the Dallas Mavericks and Stars, bringing state-of-the-art optical networks, high-definition TV and other cuttingedge technologies to the center. To fill the 800,000 square-foot venue with pervasive and secure network connectivity, the AA Center turned to Aruba.

The AA Center wanted a better way to easily and securely deploy 802.11 a/b/g technology for a variety of network applications, including in-seat concessions, real-time asset management for mobile workers, secure employee network access, wireless surveillance and ultimately public Wi-Fi hot spots. Given the massive size of the AA Center and the need to provide different services to different user groups, a centralized wireless LAN system was essential.

AA Center has deployed over 50 Aruba access points that logically connect to a centralized Aruba 5000 system across AA Center’s IP network. AA Center is leveraging Aruba’s plug-andplay deployment model to provide wireless connectivity on-demand. If network connectivity is needed quickly, AA Center IT staff merely plugs an Aruba AP into any available Ethernet port. The AP is then automatically configured through the Aruba Discovery Protocol.

AA Center’s first priority was installing a system capable of securing its inseat concession application. Order-takers equipped with Casseopia handheld devices take and fill concession transactions right at the fan’s seat. Each Casseopia is equipped with a Movian VPN client that establishes a secure and encrypted tunnel to a centralized Aruba 5000 system. Each VPN tunnel is terminated directly on the Aruba 5000 and the transactions are then forwarded to back-end accounting systems. For this application, Aruba also enforces machine authentication and stateful user policies that prevent any other wireless user or device from accessing this wireless network. Only the Media Access Control (MAC) addresses of the authorized handhelds are allowed to access to the specific SSID used for this application. In the event of MAC address spoofing the Aruba system recognizes the impersonations and automatically blacklists the device.

The AA Center had deployed third-party “fat” APs that they wanted to continue to use. These APs, however didn’t function as a unified system or provide visibility into the RF spectrum for security and troubleshooting. The AA Center placed these existing APs into a discrete VLAN and terminated that VLAN on the Aruba 5000. The Aruba system applies stateful firewall policies to user traffic thereby adding value to AA Center’s existing investment.

“Aruba’s system eliminated having to deploy and manage different devices such as VPN concentrators, RF monitoring systems, firewalls for access control and intrusion prevention systems,” said Joe Heinlein, director of Information Technology at the American Airlines Center. “A single Aruba switch in the data center now performs the tasks of more than seven other devices at about 25 percent of the cost. That’s real value no matter how you look at it,” said Heinlein.

AA Center is leveraging the Aruba system to provide different levels of network access and security over a single network. Through the use of Aruba’s centralized policy management engine, Heinlein can define roles and policies for different user groups. As each user authenticates to the network, they are assigned access rights to the network that follow them. Network services can then be restricted and controlled by a variety of different metrics including location, time-of-day, authentication method, BSSID, etc. AA Center is also using the wireless system to provide on-demand wireless network access to media and visitors as well as support over 150 wireless surveillance cameras used by security officers.

“For large-scale deployments such as these, the operational expense associated with deploying wireless dwarfs the equipment costs,” said Heinlein. “The Aruba system guts these operational and deployment costs for us - giving us centralized visiblity, security, control and management.” Heinlein noted that given the size of the facility and installation at AA Center, they are now able to troubleshoot and tune the network from a single point without manual intervention.