The time has come to present our youngest initiative, a training course that binds together the two worlds – “Wireless” and “Networking”.
This unique course combines the theoretical foundations for the wireless transmission and Wireless LAN standards, together with the practical aspects ranging from measurement, planning and troubleshooting activities, to network design and configuration of CISCO network devices. After this course, you will understand how: radio system, access mechanisms and WiFi security work, and have the skills required to plan, design, configure and troubleshoot a real network. This course’s uniqueness is also due to blending the knowledge and expertise of two professional trainers, one focusing solely on the radio systems research and development, and the other having vast experience in the network design and configuration and holding numerous CISCO certificates.
The idea for this training, came up during discussions with our clients about the CISCO Wireless technology. We understood that showing the aspects of the wireless networks configuration and troubleshooting in those networks, without understanding the basics of radio transmission and effects of the radio channel, will not be enough for the participants to design and manage those systems in an efficient way. From those discussions we could conclude that people working daily with maintenance of enterprise networks usually are skilled from IP and security fields, while lacking knowledge from radio systems, and this is exactly how we focused during the preparation of this course’s agenda.
We start the course by explaining radio transmission and radio channel basics, including aspects such as: frequency and spectrum, signal characteristics, transmitter and receiver, antennas and MIMO transmission, multipath, pathloss, shadowing, interference, coding, modulation and transmission schemes like, DSSS, OFDM or CSMA. The common denominator for all those aspects is WiFi, meaning that during explanation of a given aspect we provide practical parameters and implications especially for Wireless LAN. After explaining on how radio works, we switch to nomenclature, standards and basics of WiFi speaking on aspects such as: MAC layer, medium sensing, hidden node problem, listen-before-talk mechanism, collisions, backoff and many more. Next, we guide the participants through the WLAN network access procedure together with potential threats to network security. After the introduction, we discuss different protection methods, together with pros and cons. The next areas of the training include the basics of the design and planning of radio networks, measurements and troubleshooting of typical problems in those networks. After getting all those theoretical baselines, we move to the design and configuration of a real-life WLAN network based on CISCO devices and then to carrying out this network’s measurements and troubleshooting in the given test scenarios.
To get the detailed agenda, click here.
You can see example training materials below.