How WiTuners Help to Predict Wi-Fi Propagation Effects
WiFi is such a complex system that the average buyer/deployer/user doesn’t stand a chance of understanding even the basics of what they need to know to keep a WLAN system running optimally.
First Signs of Trouble
You can have one AP or you might have a hundred. Sure, the more complex the deployment the more involved the interoperability, protocol, and quality of service issues. But the one common design issue, no matter the size of the WLAN system, is propagation.
Put one AP in your house and you notice a dead spot in the garage. Put four APs in the office and you just can’t get reliable voice in the back office. You can’t see how the APs connect (they’re wireless, after all), so you have to guess at what’s going on. Or maybe not.
See What’s Going On
Modeling is the key, and you don’t have to be an RF engineer to diagnose your problems. There are many WLAN management tools out there and most provide a way to predict how the Wi-Fi energy radiates out of the antennas and is received in the environment by the users. The visualization is in the form of higher power (in one color), lower power (in another color), referred to as “heat maps”. The one that we find most flexible and comprehensive is the deployment and optimization tool from WiTuners.
And best of all, it’s free!
All you do is scan or draw an outline of your deployment area (walls, doors, etc.), place your APs, and assign characteristics.
Anybody can do this … really. The walls are placed by dragging and dropping onto the top of your imported drawing. You then right click on the wall and you can select from: drywall, wood, concrete, metal, or your own custom definition.
Next you place the APs around the building. Those too can be customized, or they can be left at their default configurations. All you really have to set is whether they’re 802.11b, g, n, or whatever the alphabet soup of the day is. WiTuners keeps current on the available wireless protocols and updates their software accordingly.
This tool is a SaaS (software as a service), so you run it in your browser. Just go to the WiTuners website and you start it up by clicking an icon. You get a heat map like the one shown. Now you’re ready to see how your WLAN works.
What Does It All Mean?
The dark green colors mean strong signals, the pale ones mean weak ones, and no color means that you’re in trouble. In the heat map shown, the wall above the doorway is very lossy and almost no signal gets through to the room above. On the other hand, the wall on the left is semi-transparent and there seems to be plenty of signal in the room to the left. Also, notice that the doorway provides a nice propagation path as well, as the energy “spills out”.
So, you can tinker with the AP placements or fill obvious dead zones by buying and installing an additional AP. And, best of all, WiTuners can optimize the deployment with the click of a single button. You get the right number of APs, and all of the mysterious parameter settings get suggested to you so that the network will be optimized.
A little more tweaking to make sure the APs are not placed behind heating ducts and so forth, and your network is ready to go. You will be confident that you’ve wrung all of the throughput that is possible out of the APs, your users will be connected, and their quality of service will be high (no sputtering voice calls and fewer jerky YouTubes).
Try this SaaS out at WiTuners. It’s fun to use, models the WLAN in a detailed fashion, and you and your users will be pleased to finally have an optimized WLAN.
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 wlan optimization needs.
Processing your request, Please wait....
