WHITE PAPER

How to Make Your

Wireless LAN Work:
Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity
February 2006

1 How to Make Your Wireless LAN Work: Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity
WLAN Design Challenges
“I’m just starting to develop a wireless network infrastructure, and my executives have high
expectations for a quick return on investment and excellent quality of service.” – RF Engineer

“I implemented a WLAN on a trial basis, and now I need to expand the network to the entire
company including introducing business critical applications.” – Wireless Network Manager

“My WLAN is nothing but a headache with users constantly complaining about having no
service or dropped calls on our voice over Wi-Fi system.” – IT Manager

“We have been implementing wireless networks, but the time and cost involved in conducting
a site survey makes our bids uncompetitive, and the resulting networks often do not provide
the performance expected by our customers.” – Systems Integrator

Consider the Three “C’s” When

Creating a Network Design
While the above real-world situations may not appear to have any common aspects, they
indeed do. Many people believe you can install wireless networks without spending much time
on planning and designing the installation. While these hastily installed wireless networks might
perform well enough for basic e-mail and web access, they are not sufficient for large numbers
of users, challenging environments like healthcare and retail facilities or more demanding
wireless applications such as voice-over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) or high volume financial transactions.

How can you create a wireless network that will meet your capacity and quality of service
(QoS) expectations? Some organizations recommend that you just place access points (APs)
in a grid, turn them on and add more APs as you discover problems. Others recommend a
site survey method where you place APs in a small portion of the environment and then
collect measurements of the wireless signal provided. Neither of these methods will create
a WLAN with the performance required. You must consider the three “C’s” when creating a
network design – the context of your wireless network location, the wireless signal coverage
and the network’s required capacity based on the number of users and the types of applications.

You must consider the three “C’s” of creating a network design:

Context
The context
of your wireless
network location

Capacity
Coverage The network’s
required capacity
The wireless signal based on the number
coverage of users and the
types of applications

2 How to Make Your Wireless LAN Work: Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity
Context—How Will Your Environment
Affect Your Wireless Signal?
The first issue to consider is the context of your wireless network design. You must take into
account the composition and contents of your facility, such as the location of walls, doors,
stairwells, windows and partitions, the construction of those materials and electronic
interferers. These factors can have significant impact on wireless signals, allowing them
to spill outside the building, weakening them, causing interference or even blocking them
entirely creating dead zones.

Designing for Coverage

Issues and Limitations
Now that you understand the importance environmental context plays in your wireless
network design, you must consider this context in relation to the coverage provided by your
WLAN. Wireless coverage is the area around an AP within which a client can connect to
the network. The importance of coverage really depends on the type of applications you
are running. For example, if you move from your cubicle to the conference room, your email
connection may drop due to a coverage hole—a minor annoyance. Dropping a voice call,
however, would be unacceptable, especially if the call was to a key customer. Do you want
coverage in the parking lot, or just the office cubicles? Is it important to cover the stockroom
as well as the produce aisle? Do you want coverage in the hospital lobby as well as the
nurses’ station?

Because APs use radio waves, there is a limited coverage area surrounding the AP. You
may discover that most AP manuals show circular coverage areas of a specific radius.
Unfortunately, this is misleading because AP coverage is typically not circular or uniform.
Why? As we discussed earlier, walls, tinted glass windows, metal shelving, ceilings, and
other physical obstructions can block or impede the wireless signals—a critical factor often
overlooked during the WLAN design process.

3 How to Make Your Wireless LAN Work: Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity
Traditional Design for Coverage
is Costly and Unpredictable
Many wireless networks are deployed using trial-and-error AP placement. As coverage holes
are detected, network designers add new APs—a costly and unpredictable process. Some
designers place APs in a regular pattern or grid to eliminate coverage holes. Unfortunately,
this approach does not take into account the building context and may provide WLAN services
to areas where you may not want them, like outside your building.

Another commonly used WLAN design method uses site survey devices to measure wireless
signal strength. Network designers install test APs, then walk around measuring the coverage
area. In reality, this technique is both exhausting and nearly impossible to predict precise AP
requirements.

Keep in mind that site surveys are only as good as the collected data. If you require coverage in
a given area, you will have to collect readings in that area. Otherwise, the obstructions in the
physical environment may block wireless signals. Since the environmental context plays such
a major role in determining coverage, the site survey approach falls short.

More importantly, even though you may have 100% wireless coverage in your target area,
your WLAN may not have enough capacity to keep users connected and productive.

Designing for Capacity

A Must for Today’s WLANs
What is capacity and why is it important? Wireless network capacity is the maximum amount of data
or number of users that can simultaneously be on the network. The more users on the network, the
more data you can expect the network to carry. Like cellular telephone networks, if the amount of
data the network must carry exceeds its capacity, problems such as packet loss, timeouts, or loss of
connectivity will occur.

Because each AP has a maximum bandwidth, the total bandwidth divides across the number of
users currently using that AP. Each new wireless device connecting to the AP causes the total
bandwidth available for each user to shrink. This is especially critical when users add high-
bandwidth applications such as VoWi-Fi or streaming media.

4 How to Make Your Wireless LAN Work: Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity
Designing for Capacity is Not an Easy Task
Designing for capacity is far more complex than designing for coverage. Of course, all of the
same challenges posed by the context of the physical environment still apply. Then you need to
consider three things:

● The number of people the network will service

● The user locations

● What applications they will use

For example, let’s say that you expect 20 engineers in the cubicle area will need e-mail and
web access, while five users in the sales office will need VoWi-Fi service. Since all applications
require a certain bandwidth, the number of application users in a given area defines the
total bandwidth requirement. To satisfy high bandwidth requirements, you can place APs
with overlapping coverage, thus increasing the available bandwidth within the overlap area.
However, this also introduces the chance for intra-network interference as APs whose
coverage overlaps can interfere with one another if you do not take the proper care in
assigning channels to the APs.

In summary, iterative trial-and-error AP placement and exhaustive site surveys make the
traditional WLAN design process unrealistic for networks targeted for high bandwidth or real-
time applications. In fact, you may find that the labor costs associated with these iterative
approaches may be higher than the actual WLAN equipment costs.

Fortunately, there is a wireless network design solution that allows you to consider the context
of the environment and predict coverage and capacity before deploying hardware resources.

Take Control of Wireless Network Design

The only way to solve the WLAN design challenge is to use a predictive design approach that
leverages knowledge of the context of the environment, the area to be covered and the intended
use of the network. Decades of research have led to the development of predictive design
software for simulating the coverage area and capacity of wireless devices when physical
environmental context is available. These techniques are some of the most effective ways
of planning AP placement that guarantees WLAN coverage, signal quality, capacity and
overall QoS.

With this innovative approach, the WLAN design process begins by importing data about your
facility into Motorola’s LANPlanner® software. Import formats include CAD files, scanned images,
and digital pictures. Next, you take into account the environmental context by tagging each wall
in the facility map with material types such as sheetrock or brick from a library of common
building materials. Then, you place APs within the site map and simulate the coverage areas.
The software is designed to predict the effects of physical obstructions and visually displays
a coverage strength map. The network designer can adjust the design to address identified
coverage holes.

Most importantly, this software makes designing for capacity efficient and predictable. To
do this, you simply indicate expected client locations and application requirements within
your environment. With this information, the LANPlanner simulation engine predicts if the
network capacity is sufficient given the current equipment placement and configuration. This
allows you to quickly determine whether your existing network design can sustain high data
rate applications and meet the needs of your subscribers.

5 How to Make Your Wireless LAN Work: Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity
Designing A Wireless Network
The WLAN design process begins by importing data about your facility into Motorola’s LANPlanner®
software. Import formats include CAD files, scanned images, and digital pictures. Next, you take into
account the environmental context by tagging each wall in the facility map with material types such as
sheetrock or brick from a library of common building materials. Then, you place APs within the site
map and simulate the coverage areas. The software is designed to predict the effects of physical
obstructions and visually displays a coverage strength map.

The network designer can adjust the design to address identified coverage holes. Most importantly,
this software makes designing for capacity efficient and predictable. To do this, you simply indicate
expected client locations and application requirements within your environment. With this information,
the LANPlanner simulation engine predicts if the network capacity is sufficient given the current
equipment placement and configuration. This allows you to quickly determine whether your existing
network design can sustain high data rate applications and meet the needs of your subscribers.

Figure A shows the designation of

the unique user requirements. The red area
will serve 200 Internet users in a conference
hall. The yellow area will need to handle four
users with steaming video and six employees
using email, and the Internet will be in the
blue area.

In Figure B, the software has

evaluated the impact of both the
building environment and the user requirements
to recommend the best placement of APs in
the facility. The color contours represent
different signal power levels, with green
indicating the signal will be sufficient to
service the applications and users in the
various regions.

With LANPlanner, you can solve your WLAN context, coverage and capacity challenges
by generating design guidance based upon location, number of users, bandwidth
requirements, and physical obstructions. Now you can design and deploy your wireless
network with confidence and ease.

For more information about Motorola’s LANPlanner solution, go to

www.motorola.com/enterprise.

6 How to Make Your Wireless LAN Work: Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity
Motorola, Inc.
1301 E. Algonquin Road
Schaumburg, Illinois 60196 U.S.A.
www.motorola.com/enterprise

RO-10-2000

MOTOROLA and the Stylized M Logo are registered in the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office. All other product or service names are the property of their
respective owners.

© Motorola, Inc. 2006

7 How to Make Your Wireless LAN Work: Design for Context, Coverage & Capacity