WiTuners’ Rich Feature Set Makes WLAN Easier, Faster and Farther

“If software isn’t easy to use, you’re not going to use it.” That’s a lesson you’ve probably learned the hard way more than once. Worse yet, if your job requires that you perform efficiently, accurately, and at low overhead cost, you’d better make the right decision before committing to any one software product, no matter how feature rich it purports to be.

Looking at various means of going about deploying, auditing, optimizing, and automatically tuning large (and small) WLAN systems out of a wide variety of network deployment and management tools, WiTuners stands out for many of its unique features including:

Easy deployment planning and comprehensive characterization of the WLAN
True performance based optimization
Automated, real time, hands-off adaptive tuning of the network
Automatic verification to preclude degradation to the WLAN

Let’s take a look and examine how WiTuners provides all of these valuable strategic features in a user friendly fashion.

The WiFi Deployment Managements Tools for Multi-Floors

With any WLAN deployment (or management) tool, you have to capture the overall system architecture. The WLAN system is designed within a fixed operating area of a building, oroutdoors.

WLAN deployment floor map

The goal is to take into account real world conditions in such a way that a high fidelity view of the real world WLAN is retained when providing solutions for WLAN planning, tuning, and optimization. If the fidelity is high, the WLAN deployment and management software has a better chance to drive toward an optimal WLAN operational condition. To realistically take into account essential factors describing a WLAN in the real world, we need to have at least:

Walls and Partitions
Type of Area (Office, Warehouse, … )
Area within which APs are Located
AP Technology and Parameters

Most deployment planning tools provide a way (usually with a graphical interface) of capturing the majority of these definitions. We are comfortable with this concept since it matches a Cartesian view of the world. We see floor plans in two dimensional terms, since we navigate that way as we walk about on the floor of a building.

3D structure APs tree

But it is this two dimensional thinking that gets us in trouble, since electromagnetic propagation is anything but two dimensional – antennas operate in three dimensions, always. Maybe we rely too heavily on WLAN connectivity maps as well. The familiar spider web of routers, APs, and solid and dotted lines imprint a 2D quality on a 3D world. However, for the real world WLAN, APs see not only their neighbors on the same floor but also those on the floor (or floors) above and below (or across an atrium). The possibilities for interference and collision in their protocols are endless.

By using WiTuners, the full 3D nature of the network is captured. In this example, two floors are represented in a tree structure (8 APs on one floor and 4 on another). The floors are separated by 2.8m and all propagation characteristics are included in the connectivity (and interference) estimations.

The APs are placed within this 3D structure on a floor by floor basis, with different walls, partitions, and open spaces differing from floor to floor. WiTuners makes it easy to import the separate floor plans and work on them independently, but also collaboratively. The APs are easily added with drag and drop within the operational areas. Their frequencies and other operational characteristics are set to nominal values.

Connectivity and interference are affected not only by the APs on the current floor, but also by APs on floors above and below. These are shown as shadow APs. WiTuners surveys all equipment, floor by floor, taking into consideration its effect on the APs on the floor when assessing connectivity, interference, throughput, and all of the myriad system effects contributing to the operation of the WLAN. Most importantly, these effects are taken into account when auditing and optimizing the operation of the WLAN.