Airespace is a brand of professional wi-fi equipment, as meant for big installations in a firm or campus.
The used design are central switches or appliances that 'feed' firmware and configurations to a number of access points. These access points have 2 antenna directions ( front/back ). If care is taken at positioning/aiming these ap's, the clients or other wi-fi sources can be located ( approximatly ) on a map.
Another feature is multiple essid's on the same network or group of access points. Thus traffic of more private meant wlan networks can be given other security & encryption levels in contrast to public hot-spot public like traffic. Traffic is tunneled encrypted over the wire between AP and central switch/appliance, from there it can be VLAN tagged to the corporate network. The switch to AP communication is Light Weight Access Point Protocol ( LWAPP ) which they try or tried to get RFC'ed, but Cisco is not supporting it...
Brands like Trapeze, Aruba, ExtremeNetworks are having simular features.
While this material is rather expensive for use in community networks, it show what things can be done giving more services and management capabilities with carefully designed software & hardware. I see no reason why we can't do this in free software.
Note that Cisco recently acquired Airespace putting LWAPP in even greater uncertainty.
