Wifi planning pdf

Here is how it works:. The user of WiTuners Mobile. The user of our WiFi planning software does not have to be a Wi-Fi professional. Site Survey can be performed in multiple locations at the same time. For a large remote project involves many locations, such automation saves tremendous amount of time.

The tasks in Remote Project it automates include:. A WLAN plan with optimal performance provides more capacity and better performance, and requires less maintenance while those poorly planned WLANs cost dearly in maintenance and loss in productivity. There are so many factors affecting the performance of a WLAN that even a WiFi planning software is not necessarily able to generate optimal WLAN plans, just for a single obvious reason: optimizing a WLAN is mathematically a NP problem where the time it takes to come up with an optimal solution increases with the number of APs exponentially.

As a result, such WiFi planning software often takes a short cut by excluding many affecting factors in generating a plan. There are already quite a few WiFi planning software on the market. These conventional WiFi planning software help WiFi designers and installers to create deployment plans for AP installation.

The resulting plan often gives the number of required APs, their placement and configurations. Tens of thousands wireless networks have been deployed using these plans, and they seem to work OK, until recently. What has changed? Wi-Fi planning, performance auditing, and tuning has always been difficult, complex, time consuming, and expensive, largely due to the complex nature of Wi-Fi technologies. Conventional WiFi planning software are simplified by focusing on Wi-Fi connectivity and coverage, without taking an optimal WLAN performance into consideration.

The resulting deployment plans are often sub-optimal. In the past few years, sub-optimal WLANs built with conventional WiFi planning software seem to have survived without too much end user complaint mostly because network load was typically light.

Unfortunately, such a grace period for WiFi planning software is gone for good. Today, with more and more Access Points deployed, more and more bandwidth consuming video applications running and more and more Wi-Fi enabled client devices such as tablets and smart phones, a sub-optimal WLAN is no longer tolerable.

The same is true for network operators looking for ways to off-load their cellular networks. Is there a solution? WiTuners WiFi planning software, fully backed by its Advanced Wi-Fi Tuning Technologies, provides with a suite of WLAN optimization software as a solution to keep up with these changing requirements and traffic patterns and addresses the ever increasing demand for robust and predictable WLAN performance.

The result? Optimal deployment plans that provide more capacity and require less maintenance. When a deployment plan for wireless networks is augmented with real-time inputs from network data and site surveys, it becomes a living representation of the real-world WLAN and the RF environment around it, which never falls out of date. Before you install, change or move any WLAN devices, you can test it in our WiFi planning software, and see the impact your proposed changes would have on real-world performance, capacity and coverage.

As a result, WLAN deployment plans created with our WiFi planning software provides more capacity and require less maintenance. WiTuners Planner. Place and Config APs Optimally for multiple floors and multiple sites. Easier, Faster and Better.

What-if Analysis Make changes to any properties of the wireless networks in the deployment plan and see their effects right away. Previous Next. Customizable characterization of APs and client devices.

Customizable specification of Wi-Fi environment. Real 3-D planning accounts for height of walls in signal transmission path. Use real world site survey to calibrate Wi-Fi enviroment Per site, per floor and per AP optimization.

Customizable optimization goals. Customizable optimization reports showing the optimized configurations and resulting improvement.

Read more on a list of factors the WiTuners Planner optimizes. Auto Plannning. Set the required performance goals of the WLAN Load floor maps of various graphic file formats Customize floor maps with scale and deployment area Select or define building properties of the floor Select or define your wireless network requirement Select or define your AP properties from different vendors.

Select or define your client devices in your wireless network system Specify multiple floors one by one Auto-planning wizard will place the APs, calculate and set the optimal configurations for you.

You can manually change or tune the created plan if you wish. Virtual Site Survey. A site survey robot represents a client device which can be configured to mimic any Wi-Fi client type, such as laptops, iPhones, Android tablets etc. Simply dragging and dropping or moving the robot onto a location on the floor map as if you were performing a site survey, you will see the predicted Wi-Fi performance of the client device represented by the robot.

Details and performance of Wi-Fi networks include both uplink and downlink received signal strengths, throughputs, and even the hidden nodes that the client device may experience. Once you are done with your off-site design, time to do the pre-deployment and post-deployment surveys on site with NetSpot WiFi planning tool to ensure the best result is achieved.

Ready to go online? Learn how to avoid some of the common wireless network perils:. Some wireless devices designed for home use may not be suitable for business environment, especially if the business is large.

Home access points may cost cheaper but they were not made for a space bigger than a small home office and are usually meant for single deployments. The optimal locations for access points may not turn out to be the easiest ones. And while a wireless site survey is ideal, it may be costly for small businesses.

The access point challenge can be solved with the help of one of the following approaches:. Once you set everything up it is easy to become unconcerned. However you should keep in mind that technologies evolve quickly as well as hackers' possibilities.

Keep your small business safe and unexposed to security risks, keep up with what's going on with the wireless market and where the technology is headed. Staying ahead of any possible risks will save time and money.

When you build a WLAN, don't just think about current needs, try to think about the future of your network, and prepare to grow with the technology. An advantage of wireless structures is that they are relatively easy to rearrange. Try to think through the business goals and needs in the future — choose the equipment and configuration accordingly. A wireless network is no doubt an important asset to any business, but as with everything else you should always consider the objectives, limitations, the potential benefits as well as possible problems.

Being aware of both advantages and disadvantages will keep the efficiency on the higher level and will make your wireless network a valuable asset to a successful business plan.

Estimate how many clients are going to connect to the deployed network, how much traffic is it going to need, and size up your space to see how many access points you might be installing.

It can help you estimate the optimal amount of access points and will map out their efficient placement. The visual map is very helpful as you'll be able to drag the access points and see how their positions affect your wireless coverage. A manual site survey benefits you in many ways: with the data collected you can easily create a better wireless network that will meet and exceed the expectations. When performing a manual site survey, keep the following in mind:.

Perform WiFi site surveys on your Android device. Get NetSpot. Jump to How to plan a WiFi deployment. Perform a Predictive Site Survey. Perform a manual Site Survey. Use the most suitable WiFi Planning tool. Common Wireless Networking Missteps.

WiFi Planning: Setting WiFi Coverage and Capacity Goals To start the wireless planning right, you'll need to set the coverage and capacity goals, create a predictive model that calculates how many access points APs you'll need and what their ideal placement should be, verify the accuracy of the WiFi planning predictions with the help of a manual site survey, and be ready to adjust as you go.

A good WiFi network plan is supposed to answer these questions: How many APs is the network going to need? What is the most efficient placement? What configuration for the access points will work best? What coverage and performance am I aiming at?

How to plan a WiFi deployment When planning to deploy a wireless network, think of how many clients it is going to serve, how heavy the traffic will be, how many access points it is going to need and where exactly, how much throughput you want the network to provide.

Balance the Load Accordingly Smaller or medium-sized businesses usually need less than 24 access points, but bandwidth is to be considered too. When deciding on the type and number of APs to deploy consider the following: how many client devices will be sending and receiving traffic on each SSID at the same time; client devices possibilities; what apps the devices will use; users mobility on the network; the minimum throughput levels you want to have.

For new wireless deployments, you should ask people at each site to estimate the number of users — as well as the number of wireless devices — that will be active on the network at the same time. You may not need the exact number of visitors with wireless devices but an estimate is still worth having.

Ask about their immediate requirements as well as what they think they will need in five years. Mostly you will get business objectives shorter lines in stores that you must turn into technical objectives using mobile POS. Educating people about new technical solutions to fulfill business objectives plays big role in planning. Measure activity and performance of the current network with NetSpot network monitoring tool.

Now with all of the above information you can check LAN and WLAN traffic studies to pinpoint bandwidth targets for the various categories of users and traffic, as well as client devices. Also keep in mind that when an existing network needs to be replaced, most probably it had some shortcomings that needed to be eliminated — find those out and where in the building they tended to appear.

Learn as much as you can about the wired network you are going to integrate the wireless devices with. Learn about topology and addressing scheme. Perform a Predictive Site Survey With all the information that you now have about network goals and user categories, it is time to use a planning tool to estimate the number of access points needed and the correct placement for them.

The WiFi planner will estimate the optimal number of access points. Power Up Now that you know how many WLAN access points your network will need, decide on the power requirements to support these points, typically 15 watts or less. Perform a manual Site Survey Use a Wi-Fi planning tool to do predictive site surveys , which will help with access points placement plus decide on which power levels to set according to the data collected at the interviewing stage.

Keep the following tips in mind when performing a manual site survey: For data services, create the network where the wireless devices have a minimum RSSI received signal strength indicator of dBm and an SNR of 20 dB or higher. It would be ideal if a client was able to detect a signal of dBm or better from one access point and another signal of dBm or better from one or more other points. A client will firstly connect to an access point with a stronger signal and as it moves closer to a different AP and the signal there grows stronger the client can switch to the new AP.

In case there are too many access points with equally strong signals then you can consider thinning them out or lower their Tx power. Use the most suitable WiFi Planning tool Even if you have developed quite a good eye and can predict where the access points will go, it may not be a good plan for a large network that will be using multiple routers and may spread out to several floors of the building.

Assume one floor to be one zone. Breaking floors into multiple zones may not work very well. Be accurate, but keep it easy. Simply drawing the main interior and exterior walls will do it. Use the heatmaps to evaluate the result. Does it meet the initial requirements or needs some tweaks? Not that it needs to be said, but use an optimal amount of APs — not too many not too few. Common Wireless Networking Missteps Ready to go online?

Learn how to avoid some of the common wireless network perils: This Access Point Worked at Home Some wireless devices designed for home use may not be suitable for business environment, especially if the business is large.