Designing your WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) involves lots of planning work to build a reliable Wireless network.
Few factors to take into consideration for the wireless design. Some of the things to think about are the types of traffic, the amount of throughput provided, the number of customers the network needs to support. As the demand is growing on the wireless network to provide real-time streaming (Voice and Video) various types of devices which in turn, is also increasing.
There is 5 steps to designing you wireless network: Information gathering.
- Information Gathering
Information needed to build the wireless network consist of knowing the types of devices you designing for, the number of users and type of traffic to be supported. Reaching out to the managers and the people who will be using the network, either by interviews or simply using a questionnaire. The gathered information should include, the estimated number of users, the number of devices to be connected to the wireless simultaneously.
Although it’s difficult to estimate the number of visitors/guests to the facility but it is very beneficial to have a rough number to be able to design you r network to accommodate all potential users.
Site Visit
- Initial walk-through to identify anticipated difficult zones and confirm survey areas,
- Passive and spectrum Site Survey of the entire site to determine any potential WiFi and Non-WiFi interferes
- Collect floor plans showing exiting Access Points locations if it is possible to re-use existing cable drops.
- Take a single corridor or room wall length measurement to be used to scale the floor plan in the software modeling tool.
- Take measurements between the ceiling and floor to determine the ceiling height in different locations
- Identify high density areas, for example: meeting / boardrooms, lunch areas, cubicles, auditoriums, etc. And difficult areas, for example: operating rooms, emergency rooms (Triage), labs, diagnostic imaging, MRI, high security areas, warehouse contents, outdoor coverage, etc.
Potential number of users, Ceiling height, Can Access Points be installed on Walls, Ceiling or floors.
What is being stored in shelves, could this reflect or attenuate the WiFi signal.
Collect 802.11 Antenna properties for the handheld devices to be used
if so, what are the Coverage requirements?
What other out of scope areas.
Identifying the maximum supported number of users in when planning coverage for High density areas like Meeting rooms, classrooms.