WiTuners for Automated WLAN Optimization
Do you ever feel that your Wi-Fi equipment isn’t quite delivering the performance that it should? Dead zones, dropped calls, and freezing Skype screens? You’re probably right, and there’s something that you can do about it.
Where Do the Problems Come From?
Many things can go wrong after a WLAN is installed and up and running. Patterns of traffic that the WLAN is carrying can change, and they can change often. The radio environment is dynamic (and it can change quite frequently) due to unexpected interference, new obstructions (doors open and close, you know), the introduction of new equipment, and so forth. Constant performance monitoring is necessary to ensure that the WLAN is operating to meet throughput demands.
What Should You Expect?
Sure, you’re connected, but what should you expect throughput to be?You can’t just look on the box the APs came in, read: It’s the newest 130 Mbps AP on the Market, multiply 130 Mbps by the number of APs that you have, and use that as the expected capacity of the network. Many factors will affect the throughput capacity of your network: interference, overlapping coverage, propagation anomalies, poor configuration selections, quality of service (QoS) policies, ad infinitum.
Fortunately, there’s a great tool out there, and best of all it’s free. WiTuners is able to capture your WLAN layout, the positions and types of APs, and your mix of traffic.
A virtual simulation shows exactly what the maximum capacity of your network is, as well as whether you’re getting close to exceeding it. In this example, the predicted performance has bumped into an alert warning in two places. You’d better do something if you want your users to stay happy (and not start complaining to you to fix it).
Now What Do I Do?
You can start tweaking the controls on your APs: frequency, power level, delays, and so forth. But who understands the definitions of all these parameters, let alone whether changing them will actually improve things or cause more harm? There’s an easy answer.
While WiTuners generates the upper bound performance metric for auditing (and whether you bump into it), it is also capable of optimizing the WLAN settings to raise the performance bound. But if I fix it now, will it stay optimized in the future? Probably not. The environment changes (cubicle walls are moved), people get faster feature phones (which demand more throughput), and the conference room can get really crowded (quickly exceeding your estimated traffic bound).
Automation is the answer, and WiTuners makes provision for this powerful concept in its operational suite.
Here we see our same warnings, but this time WiTuners has optimized the network to accommodate the higher traffic. It has changed the operational settings of every AP in your system to operate optimally. An improvement of about 50% has been realized in this case (which is not unusual). The important thing is that it’s adaptive – triggered by the warning event and tuned automatically to keep the network running optimally.
As you manage your WLAN, keep these scenarios in mind.. Better yet, just go there and try it before your network gets into trouble … it’s easy to use and your clients will think you’re a genius.
If you need to improve the performance of your Wi-Fi, go to http://www.wituners.com and try out their free version of WiTuners for your wifi planning
Processing your request, Please wait....
