Concept of Service Zone on the 4ipnet Wireless LAN Controller

Service Zones are virtual partitions of the physical LAN side of a 4ipnet Controller.

Similar to VLANs, they can be separately managed and defined, having their own user

landing pages, network interface settings, DHCP servers, authentication options,

policies and security settings, and so on. By associating a unique VLAN Tag (when it is

tag-based) and an SSID with its Service Zone, administrator can flexibly separate the

wired and wireless networks easily.

Tag-based or Port-based Service Zones

4ipnet WHG controllers offer two modes of physical LAN port to service zone mappings,

namely port-based mode and tag-based mode. Intuitively as the name suggests,

Port-based mode means that each LAN port services one or none Service Zones, so

the maximum number of service zones is equivalent to the number of LAN ports on a

4ipnet WHG controller.

On the contrary, Tag-based service zones are not limited by the number of ports, for

they are specified by the VLAN tag ID pre-defined by the admin, regardless of which

LAN port. A simple concept is displayed in the picture below.

As the figure depicts, a staff of a firm is associated with a certain SSID broadcast by

an access point. This SSID belongs to, let’s say, VAP with VLAN ID 15. Therefore the

AP’s traffic when forwarded back to the Controller will be mapped to Service Zone 1

with configurations set for staff access.

Configuration Mapping

Admin can change the type of service zones. There are some grayed-out service zones

because they have been disabled. Therefore, admin should first go to ‘System >

Service Zones > Configure’ to enable the needed service zones.

If the setting is change to Tag-based, the correspondence of service zones and ports

will be grayed out. Each Service Zone will need to be assigned a unique VLAN ID,

ranging from 1 to 4096.