A great wireless network doesn’t just happen – it needs a proper design. A proper design will not only increase the reliability and performance of your network, you’ll also save money by not overspending on unnecessary network infrastructure.
- What is Wi-Fi Design?
- Why Design Matters
- 6 Key Design Considerations
- Translating Wi-Fi Requirements into a Design
- The Best Tools for Wi-Fi Design
What is Wi-Fi Design?
The design process takes your business’ requirements for wireless connectivity and turns them into a high-performing and reliable Wi-Fi network. The design needs to take into consideration how many devices need Wi-Fi, where they need it and what content they need to access. The result will determine how many access points you’ll need, where they need to be installed, and how they should be configured in order to satisfy the demands of your users.
Why Wi-Fi Design Matters?
Wireless networks are like electricity in today’s business world. When Wi-Fi is down, work stops. A bad design can not only negatively impact performance today, but it can also have lingering effects, making it more difficult to troubleshoot and fix problems later. Costly outages, loss of revenue, and lack of productivity may all result from bad Wi-Fi design.
Professional Wi-Fi design tools let you model and validate your design’s effectiveness and ensure it will achieve high performance from day one and allow you to iterate and optimise to account for changes to your requirements over time. With the correct design Wi-Fi performance will be optimal across a range of devices and access points replaced with newer designs as technology changes.
Good Wi-Fi is good for business. Wi-Fi is a part of nearly every mission-critical application used in business — from self-driving forklifts and barcode scanners in warehouses to the fleet of laptops and phones deployed throughout your organisation. It’s in the life-sustaining medical devices we rely on for health and wellness. It keeps us connected when we need to communicate and collaborate, and it gives us an escape when we need to isolate.
You only notice Wi-Fi when it isn’t working. We have all experienced the frustration of poor-performing Wi-Fi networks. Globally, countless are reported to be performing poorly— unable to meet their requirements for overall coverage and capacity with minimal interference. One of the biggest reasons Wi-Fi networks are poor performing is due to poor design.
6 Key Design Considerations for Satisfying Your Business AND RF Requirements
The most important aspect of designing a high-performing Wi-Fi network is defining network requirements. All too often, networks fail to meet requirements due to an incomplete discovery process. The same principles apply to building design.
Requirements can be broken down into two main categories:
1) business requirements and 2) RF requirements.
Business Requirements
Identifying business requirements for how a network will be used makes it easy to translate business needs into the specific inputs for your design software.
What are the different types of clients that will need to connect to your network? How many of those clients need concurrent access? What is the least capable, most important device for your business? What are the expectations of the network beyond “We need good Wi-Fi”? The answers to these questions will help you translate the business needs into Wi-Fi design requirements for Coverage, Capacity and the Least Capable, Most Important Device.
One of the most fundamental Wi-Fi design considerations is coverage planning. Primary coverage is all about area and optimising the distance around your wireless transmitters to ensure there is sufficient signal strength for Wi-Fi-enabled devices to connect. Layering in effective secondary coverage ensures you have the right amount of overlap to ease device roaming and provide redundancy for your business-critical Wi-Fi needs.
Poor design can result in either too many APs (which can increase your overall hardware and installation costs and can cause Co-Channel Contention / Interference) or too few APs (which will not provide the necessary coverage requirements and result in coverage gaps).
A number of Wi-Fi design tools are available to show positioning of access points, coverage areas and signal strengths on both 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies.
2. Capacity
Capacity planning goes a step beyond coverage and takes into account the different types and number of devices and applications that will connect to the network. Wireless network capacity is a measurement of the amount of traffic supported concurrently on a wireless network based on the bandwidth being consumed.
Poorly planned capacity requirements can be devastating for users. Slow speeds and intermittent connectivity drops can be the result of not identifying proper requirements for usage. It can also be a symptom of growing pains as more users are added and new devices become introduced over time without adjusting for the increased capacity demand.
Capacity needs can also vary for different areas of a site, depending on your use case. Let’s take hotels, for example. The guest rooms, lobby, outdoor pool, and conference center may each have unique capacity requirements — and Wi-Fi design software makes it easy to design different capacity areas for the unique needs of each area.
3. Designing for the Least Capable, Most Important Device
While reviewing the various types of devices that will be connecting to your network, it’s key to identify which devices are the most critical, and which of those devices is the least technologically advanced — these are known as the Least Capable, Most Important devices (LCMID).
Believe it or not, designing Wi-Fi for the latest devices to hit the market is usually quite straightforward, it’s identifying the one device that if it were to suddenly go offline would grind business to a halt — that’s the tricky part.
Here are some of the usual suspects for your network’s LCMID:
A 10-year-old warehouse scanner used 12 hours per day to scan barcodes for inventory management
The point-of-sale registers used to facilitate retail transactions
Your CEO’s laptop (simply refuses to get a new one)
For these types of devices, you need to research the manufacturer’s posted specifications to ensure they will perform reliably on the network. Your predictive design is only as good as the inputs you define, and determining your LCMID is critical for the design of your Wi‑Fi network.
RF Requirements
The physical environment plays a big role in how a network performs. Turn to the site floor plan and walk the site to gather information to help you identify the radio frequency (RF) behaviour in your environment.
How high are ceilings in the coverage area? Is there sufficient access to mount access points? What are the walls made of? How noisy are the neighbouring networks? The answers to these questions will help you translate environmental factors into RF requirements for Obstacles in the Physical Environment, Wall Material Attenuation, and RF Spectrum Activity.
4. Obstacles in the Physical Environmental and Where to Install APs
High ceilings, exposed metal ductwork, inventory fluctuations, living atriums, and modern art installations may not be documented in a simple building floor plan, but obstacles like these should be taken into account with your Wi-Fi requirements.
Floor plans only tell part of a story. Whenever possible, you should walk the site and gather information to help you identify the RF behaviour in your environment.
Doing a pre-design floor walk survey will help you get the correct information to plug into your predictive design software. Make sure you document any potential concerns for RF: exposed ceilings with ductwork, columns, signage, large pieces of furniture, areas off-limits, etc.
These walk-throughs may also illuminate previously unconsidered limitations to wireless infrastructure placement — where you are unable to place APs, or where you are unable to run cables.
5. Wall Material and Attenuation Testing
The size, shape, and types of wall materials in your network’s environment all need to be accounted for when designing for WiFi. That’s because the environment’s physical characteristics impact RF coverage.
Every wall attenuates Wi-Fi signals. That means the RF strength gets partially or fully absorbed by the material. Drywall typically reduces the signal strength by 3dB. Large concrete pillars can stop a Wi-Fi signal in its tracks! Understanding the different materials in your environment and their attenuation values is key for designing a great wireless network.
Your Wi-Fi network lives in a world of electromagnetic spectrum. Understanding the spectrum activity around you leads you toward an effective channel plan for your project. Here are some things to consider:
- Channel Contention: Access points, whether on your neighbour’s network or your own, need to be spaced properly with proper channel plans or risk suffering channel contention.
- Non-Wi-Fi Interference: Things like microwaves, Bluetooth devices, spy cameras, and motion sensors can all interfere with your Wi-Fi network’s ability to send and receive data. Issues caused by Wi-Fi interference can range from an intermittent connectivity loss to reduced data transfer and network speeds to a reduction in signal strength.
- DFS Checks and Radar Activity: Depending on the frequencies being used, radar equipment may interfere with Wi-Fi network data transmission and vice-versa. Radar can impact the performance of your Wi-Fi network by limiting the amount of 5 GHz channels you can use, or it can cause a decline in performance if your APs are constantly changing channels to avoid DFS events.
- Channel Widths: The wider the channel, the higher the potential throughput. Depending on the current RF environment and density of Wi-Fi radios, you’ll be able to determine the preferred channel width for your project. Always use the widest channel width you can without causing excessive channel contention issues.
Translating Requirements into a Wireless Network Design
- Coverage: APs placed and coverage visualized on a scaled floor plan with accurate walls
- Capacity: Usage and device profiles identified listing applications and client models in use
- Least Capable, Most Important Device: Device profile created for the LCMID
- Obstacles in the Physical Environment: Ceiling heights set & deployment notes cited to account for obstacles
- Wall Material Attenuation: Appropriate wall types used throughout the floor plan including custom-created wall types
- RF Spectrum Activity: A channel plan that reduces co-channel interference and optimises client performance
Conclusion
Now that you have learned the best practices of wireless network design, you are on your way to making better decisions while building your Wi-Fi network.
ICS Technologies builds and deploys wired and Wi-Fi networks. Contact us for your wired and wireless networking requirements.
