Optimizing Measurements – traffic demand and WLAN performance

You need to have two measurements of operation within your WLAN in order to have any hope of optimizing performance – traffic demand and WLAN performance. Traffic is pretty easy; it’s the requested service for data, voice, and video applications as a function of time. Performance is more elusive; it’s the end user’s experience in the consumption of requested traffic, including latency, retries, distortion, and other quality of service (QoS) measures. Indeed, performance is what really matters to the end users of a WLAN so far as having a good experience.

Now, assume that you have somehow obtained measurements of traffic and performance (in real time). What do you do with it? Your NMS can pinpoint bottlenecks, give you histograms of demand versus time, and untold statistics showing which APs have high or low QoS measures throughout the day. Do you buy more APs if traffic is high? What level of traffic? What percentage of the time? Can you retune your APs?

The secret to answering any and all of these questions is to find a true Performance Based Optimization tool such as WiTuners. That means that performance is measured and then tuning is performed on the WLAN to optimize network throughput at a correspondingly high level of QoS.