Wi-Fi

Recently, we’ve been doing numerous site surveys and verification of Wi-Fi deployments in offices with more than 50APs per office in a managed setup (meaning that the APs are under the supervision of a wireless controller). In this post, I’d like to sketch an overview of the encountered issues and improvement suggestions.

We’ve been bringing the tech trends to the readers of our blog, by continuing to write on certain topics (like 5G, SD-WAN, Wi-Fi networking). As a summary from 2019, we have compiled here a list of the 5 most popular posts from our website.

We’ve built a high density and high capacity network. In order to properly operate such network, we designed a custom monitoring and analytics solution based on Elastic Stack and MQTTbeat receiving the measurements from all 494 IoT gateways (i.e. 494 Wi-Fi APs) through an MQTT broker. In this post I’m sheding some light on the different aspects of the solution and custom dashboards.

The AP schedules the transmission according to the actual needs, and nobody wastes time on waiting and on collision. So, we end-up having the system that: is more robust towards low latency services; is more spectrally efficient; allows for actually use some QoS profiles; and coordinates the use of spectrum.

Wi-Fi Generations affect not only new releases, but also refer to the past amendments. Currently Wi-Fi Alliance has defined 6 generations. Each step is significant improvement in network performance and security. No more minor version changes that can cause only confusion.

The 802.11ax brings important features, focusing on network capacity, latency and range. High data rates are still in the picture, but rather in the background. Introducing OFDMA and using MU-MIMO allows AP to schedule data for multiple users simultaneously. This way, latency can be greatly decreased. With the new colors of the channels, frequencies can be spatially reused.

This post discusses selected practical aspects of Wi-Fi systems including: explanation of some parameters and factors that the network performance is impacted by; showing how to configure some of the parameters them using CISCO Wireless LAN Controller; presenting simulated scenarios to show some examples of radio measurements.

Introduction to Wi-Fi Security Distributing data using wireless medium means that anyone can capture the signal. There is no boundary, like in case of cable communication, which prevents unwanted access. This means we must take other security measures. In this blogpost we will review current algorithms providing Wi-Fi security and we will take a sneak […]

The problem, network components and topology I recently faced the issue with AP join to vWLC. Cisco 2700 AP could not join to newly installed Cisco vWLC controller. Coleague asked me to take a look and explained the topology. The vWLC was located in Grandmetric DC Testing Labs whereas Cisco CAP-2700 was located at Grandmetric […]

Introduction First Wi-Fi networks appeared in late 90s and many of us use them ever since. During these years we could observe significant increase of throughput, but what is important, it is not only due to the ISP providing better link. Wi-Fi standard also evolved to keep up with the higher throughputs. If there will […]