FUNDAMENTALS OF WI-FI

WI-FI NETWORK DESIGN

SO MUCH INTERRELATED
KNOWLEDGE

WI-FI NETWORK
DESIGN
WI-FI NETWORK DESIGN

ELEMENTS OF A DESIGN PROCESS

▸ Customer requirements

▸ Understanding your site

▸ Radio Frequency (RF) planning

▸ Capacity planning

▸ Equipment
 WI-FI NETWORK
DESIGN

CUSTOMER
REQUIREMENTS
In this section we’ll talk about:

1. Client devices

2. Applications

3. Client density

4. Budget
 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

CLIENT DEVICES
▸ Different devices have different
WiFi cards, and will therefore
behave differently on a given
network.

A MacBook Pro may have a 3 x 3: 3 802.11n interface, while a mobile device may be capable of 802.11ac 2 x 2: 2.

Surveying your device population and refresh cycle will help establish your design parameters.
 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

CLIENT DEVICES
▸ Various vendors document
device capabilities at different
levels of detail.

▸ Sometimes (as with Apple)

you have to hunt for
information or work your way
back from published specs.

Apple also occasionally publishes IT-oriented documents regarding deployment of devices that includes details on the capabilities of its devices, but these become dated
quickly, as with Apple’s iOS 6 Deployment Guide at https://www.apple.com/ca/education/docs/ios_6_education_deployment_guide.pdf.

Another trick is to look at FCC compliance paperwork to discover equipment chipsets, then work your way back to the OEM to determine specifications.

 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

CLIENT DEVICES

▸ http://clients.mikealbano.com

Mike Albano runs an ongoing project to document the capabilities of common client devices, documenting not only spatial stream capabilities, but also channels that
devices can or can not use.

Always worth checking out what’s going on at http://mikealbano.com.

 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

Required
Application
Throughput

Web Browsing 500 Kbps - 1 Mbps

SD Video Streaming 1 - 1.5 Mbps

AppleTV Streaming 2.5 - 8 Mbps

The detailed chart from which this information is taken is in the Aerohive Design and Configuration Guide for High Density Wi-Fi, by Andrew von Nagy, available from
Aerohive at http://docs.aerohive.com/330000/docs/help/english/5.1r2/ref/Aerohive_High-Density_Wi-Fi-Design-Config-Guide_330073-01.pdf

 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

DENSITY

▸ How many devices are you going to have in an area?

▸ How many devices will your users carry?

1. A 600 seat lecture hall is a significant challenge due to the number of people involved.

2. If you have a staff each of whom carry a laptop, tablet, and a phone, the design expectation is going to be very different from an environment where you’re designing
for every student having a tablet.

3. How many devices an AP can handle is a very specific question; there’s no real standard for this, and the veracity of vendor claims should always be tested to avoid
pain.
CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

DENSITY

▸ Critical when you think about environments such as lecture

halls or classrooms

▸ Critical when thinking about the use model for Wi-Fi

network
CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

BUDGET

▸ Because of the nature of the 5 GHz band, a 5 GHz network

requires more equipment, and thus more money.

▸ A budget constructed prior to a project plan will lead to

trouble.
 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

SO SING A SONG OF
SIXPENCE.

Lin Manuel-Miranda (as Alexander Hamilton)

And under-budgeted project stands an excellent chance of failing completely, so be careful what you get into.
 WI-FI NETWORK
DESIGN

UNDERSTANDING
YOUR SITE
In this section we’ll talk about:

1. Facility Size

2. Construction, obstacles, and known interferers

3. Usage and key spaces

4. Neighboring networks

5. Network infrastructure
 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

FACILITY SIZE
▸ Facility size can give you a starting
point for estimating the equipment
required.

▸ Ceiling heights affect coverage

and signal intensity.

▸ Multiple floor facilities require

special care due to channel
overlap issues.

Per Spock in Wrath of Khan, two dimensional thinking is extremely limiting.

 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

CONSTRUCTION AND OBSTACLES

▸ Look for concrete, rebar, and elevator shaft; also, lathe and
plaster with gypsum lathe

▸ Look for heavy or metal furniture

The last will be maddening, because (1) they’re everyday objects that most people don’t think about very much; (2) they get moved around without a lot of thought to
what they might be affecting.
 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

USAGE AND KEY SPACES

▸ Administrative offices may have only minimal use

▸ Classrooms may have consistent heavy use

▸ Conference room may have intermittent heavy use

▸ A 600-seat lecture hall will be a nightmare and is crucial to

identify

You want to document all this, and be realistic about it. As you’ll see when we start to talk about airtime, expected usage combines with airtime requirements to help you
define your equipment requirements and your channel planning.
 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

NEIGHBORING NETWORKS

Signal strength and channel overlap of neighboring networks can help you decide what channels to avoid in your RF planning, but be aware that the environment will
change unpredictably.

A lot of enterprise-grade WiFi equipment will offer to self-select channels on a dynamic basis. This is worth investigating, but also worth mistrusting to some extent.
 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

INTERFERENCE SOURCES AND SPECTRUM UTILIZATION

Spectrum analysis can give you more, though. In this picture we’re seeing the utilization of 2.4 GHz channels in addition to their presence and relative strength. Busier
channels show warmer colors (red) and higher utilization levels. Since a spectrum analyzer gets below the level of WiFi, we can see communication that isn’t WiFi.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE (PHYSICAL PLANT)

▸ Does cabling exist already?

▸ Do you have someone to handle cabling?

▸ Is your switching adequate?

▸ (And what about power?)

UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

SITE SURVEY

How are you going to use a site survey to develop a plan?

▸ “AP on a stick” survey

▸ Predictive site survey

 UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

PREDICTIVE MODELING SOFTWARE

▸ Ekahau Site Survey

▸ Fluke Airmagnet

▸ Tamograph Site Survey

(Bring all the dollars)

Predictive modeling uses specialized software to estimate coverage using known information about Wi-Fi equipment and gathered information about a facility, e.g. it has
pre-programmed attenuation characteristics of construction materials built-in.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

PREDICTIVE MODELING SOFTWARE

▸ Speeds up the planning and design process

▸ Liable to built-in assumptions, e.g. how much attenuation a

particular type of wall imposes
 ACTUALLY DEPLOY
AND TEST ONSITE

AP ON A STICK
AP on a stick is useful for gathering basic performance metrics, but becomes difficult to impossible when attempting to gather complex information or plan extremely
large installations.
UNDERSTANDING YOUR SITE

SO WHAT DO PROFESSIONALS ACTUALLY DO?

A hybrid process

1. Visit site to gather facility information and perform

attenuation and interference testing

2. Run a predictive survey using a planning tool

3. Validate the predictive survey onsite during or

following the install, adjusting as necessary.
 WI-FI NETWORK DESIGN

RF AND CHANNEL PLANNING

We want to ensure that our clients receive adequate radio signal and suffer the least possible contention and interference, so in this section we’ll talk about:

1. Channel selection

2. Channel width

3. DFS (again)
RF PLANNING

CHANNEL SELECTION GOAL

▸ Pick channels to minimize co-channel interference and

avoid adjacent channel interference.
 RF PLANNING

CHANNEL SELECTION (2.4 GHZ)

▸ 3 non-overlapping
20 MHz channels 1 6 11

in North America:

11 1 6

1, 6, 11

1 6 11

Some equipment vendors in the consumer space provide an option for 40 MHz bonded channels, which removes all ability to prevent channel overlap. You shouldn’t ever
do this.
Designing a 2.4 GHz channel plan without overlap is difficult; in a multi-floor environment it’s virtually impossible.

In addition, the attenuation characteristics of 2.4 GHz are such that neighboring networks will impose CCI and ACI from greater distances than you might expact.

Successful design for client density is nearly impossible using only 2.4 GHz channels.

RF PLANNING

CHANNEL SELECTION (5 GHZ)

▸ Many more channel options

▸ Many more caveats

 RF PLANNING

CHANNEL SELECTION (5 GHZ)

▸ 9 x 20 MHz channels + 15 x 20 MHz DFS channels

▸ Options for wider channels (40 MHz and 80 MHz), which

can provide higher performance*

▸ Wider channels reduce the number of channels available

*Assuming your clients can take advantage of that higher performance.

Wider channels provide for faster connections, but reduce the number of channels available.
 RF PLANNING

AVAILABLE 5 GHZ CHANNELS (UNITED STATES)

Note how as channels get wider, the number available falls. Pay particular attention to the 160 MHz channels.
RF PLANNING

CHANNEL SELECTION (5 GHZ)

▸ Keep in mind that 5 GHz signals

attenuate more quickly than 2.4
GHz signals.

Courtesy NASA/JPL/CalTech
 WAIT, THERE’S A WRINKLE

5 GHZ AND DFS

15 of the 24 available 20 MHz channels in the 5 Ghz band share frequencies with a variety of civilian and military radar systems, including the Terminal Doppler Weather
Radar (TDWR) used at major airports to improve takeoff and landing safety by detecting wind shear associated with thunderstorms
 RF PLANNING

5 GHZ AND DFS

APs on these channels must dynamically change their
channel if they detect radar emissions.

UNII-2: 52, 56, 60, and 64

UNII-2 Ext: 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 124, 128,
132, 136, 140

As an example, Aerohive’s cloud controller won’t even allow you to access these channels for use unless you also enable Dynamic Frequency Selection.
In addition, FCC regulations disallow DFS channels within 35 km of Terminal Doppler Weather Radar systems.

Are you in the Pacific Northwest? You’re probably cool.

Are you east of the Mississippi? You’ve got some more problems.
 RF PLANNING

DFS AND 5GHZ

▸ Excluding DFS vastly reduces the number of available

channels of each width.

9 x 20 MHz channels

4 x 40 MHz channels

2 x 80 MHz channels
 WI-FI NETWORK DESIGN

CAPACITY PLANNING
Planning for capacity has superseded coverage as the holy grail of Wi-Fi network design.

1. Equipment specs and limitations

2. Power

3. Network throughput

4. Installation and mounting

5. Density

6. Airtime
NETWORK DESIGN

CAPACITY PLANNING

▸ Capacity planning can move us away from Wi-Fi standards,

and toward reliance on vendor implementations

▸ Standards simply do not exist here

 CAPACITY PLANNING

VENDOR REQUIREMENTS

▸ Controllers have upper limits to the number of client

devices and APs that they can handle

▸ Controllers are often licensed for a specified # of APs

▸ There isn’t a quantifiable standard for AP capacity.

Ruckus 3025 controller can handle approximately 1000 concurrent clients

CAPACITY PLANNING

NETWORK THROUGHPUT

▸ Wireless APs can move more than 100 Mbps

▸ Check whether your switches can handle speeds required;

in many cases you will need gigabit
 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

CLIENT COUNT (DENSITY)

▸ Vendors make various claims about clients per-AP

▸ Many of these claims are “best case”

▸ Ruckus says 500 until you ask about encryption, then

says 100 per-radio.

▸ Aerohive claims 100 per-radio

▸ Meraki classifies 40+ devices on an AP as “high density”

Ruckus note at https://forums.ruckuswireless.com/ruckuswireless/topics/max_client_per_ap

Aerohive note at https://community.aerohive.com/aerohive/topics/ap230_maximum_concurrent_user

CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

DENSITY
▸ Wi-Fi is more complicated
than an environment in
which you connect clients
to a switch until you run
out of ports.
TEXT

DENSITY AND AIRTIME

▸ The sharing of the bandwidth in an
AP makes things more analogous
to use of an Ethernet hub.
THE WEIRD TURN PRO

AIRTIME
 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

AIRTIME

Calculated percentage of available time a client device

will utilize; determining this requires:

1. Known application bandwidth requirement

2. Known real client performance

We start with the assumption that the TX rate is double the truth.
 AIRTIME CALCULATION
Airtime required is expressed as a percentage of available airtime.
 TEXT

AIRTIME: IPAD 2
SD Video = 1 Mbps

65 Mbps max TX = 30 Mbps actual

performance

Question: If iPad 2 can only provide 65 Mbps theoretical throughput, how much does a 1300 Mbps-capable AP help network performance?
 TEXT

AIRTIME: IPAD 2

Ultimately, it sometimes will not matter how fast your APs are, because the client airtime requirements do so much to determine the need.
CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

AIRTIME: IPAD 2

▸ In theory then, 30 iPad 2 units stream 1 Mbps video would

chew up all the available airtime on a single access point.

▸ Note how this assumes no performance loss from

interference, attenuation, or other sources.

▸ In addition, this assumes no degradation from client

transmission collisions.
 CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS

AIRTIME: ANOTHER WRINKLE

▸ iPad Mini 3 will work on 20 MHz and 40 MHz channels

40 MHz = 300 Mbps TX = ~135 Mbps real

20 MHz = 144 Mbps TX = ~65 Mbps real

Remember to refer to your MCS Index charts for the maximum TX available for a device in a given environment.
 MIX DEVICE CAPABILITIES, AND THINGS
GET REAL COMPLICATED.

AIRTIME
Think about what happens if you have a requirement for 6 Mbps bandwidth, and a mixed group of iPad mini 3 and iPad 2 devices. Each iPad 2 device will require 20%
airtime, which means that 5 iPad 2 devices will chew up all the airtime available.
 WI-FI NETWORK DESIGN

EQUIPMENT
The equipment considerations we’ll discuss are

1. Power

2. Cabling

3. Network

4. Installation and mounting

EQUIPMENT CONSIDERATIONS

POWER
▸ Access points require power, but
are typically installed in hard-to-
reach locations.

▸ Power over Ethernet solves this,

but requires infrastructure and
knowledge to implement
successfully.
 WI-FI NETWORK DESIGN

POWER OVER ETHERNET

802.3af 802.3at

Nickname PoE PoE+ (plus)

Wattage/
15.4W 34.2W
port
Wattage/
12.95W 25.5W
guaranteed

Two different PoE standards exist, providing different amounts of power per-port. Access points will

802.11ac access points running 3 x 3:3 tend to require PoE+ for full functionality; otherwise they step down to a lower performance level, e.g. 2 x 2:2.
EQUIPMENT CONSIDERATIONS

POE BUDGETS
▸ Zyxel GS1900-8

8 ports

802.3af and 802.3at-capable

70W power budget

▸ So how many APs is that?

EQUIPMENT CONSIDERATIONS

POE BUDGETS
▸ Zyxel GS1900-8

8 ports

802.3af and 802.3at-capable

70W power budget

▸ So how many APs is that?

2 x 25.4W APs

5 x 12.95W APs
 EQUIPMENT CONSIDERATIONS

POE BUDGETS

A final consideration for power budgeting is that different manufacturers’ access points draw different amounts of power via PoE, which could make your calculations
against power budgets more complex.

Clockwise from top-left, these are the power draw figures for a Cisco Meraki MR42, and Aruba AP105, and a Ruckus R500.
EQUIPMENT
CONSIDERATIONS

NETWORK AND
CABLING
 EQUIPMENT CONSIDERATIONS

NETWORK AND CABLING

▸ APs will require ethernet cabling
for data and power, but how
much?

▸ Also note that 100 Mbps will likely

be too slow for modern access
points and TX rates.

▸ IEEE standards require Category 5

cabling, so beware of Category 3.

Enterprise APs often come with more than one Ethernet port, for several reasons, primarily to provide link-aggregation via two connections. Note that on this Aerohive
AP230, PoE is only available on a single ethernet port.
INSTALLATION AND MOUNTING
EQUIPMENT CONSIDERATIONS

INSTALLATION AND MOUNTING

▸ Vendors typically use
omnidirectional antennas in APs,
which generate a specific radiation
pattern.

▸ In general, vendors design

enterprise grade APs for wall or
ceiling mounting to provide best
coverage
Usually, that means “not like this”.
MORE LIKE THIS

INSTALLATION
AND MOUNTING
 WI-FI NETWORK DESIGN

CONCLUSIONS
We’ve seen how a number of elements can influence your design process.

1.Customer requirements

2.Understanding your site

3.Radio Frequency (RF) planning

4.Capacity planning

5.Equipment

But what does it all mean?