Hello, and welcome to this video where I will provide an overview of the four phases of the wireless LAN design framework. They are define, design, deploy, and diagnose. Our first phase, define, is all about gathering and defining wireless’s LAN requirements. And the first part of the define phase is to gather the business requirements and constraints. These are always defined by the business and will outline the purpose of the wireless LAN and where the wireless LAN should be operational. Now, from the business requirements, we then define and gather the technical requirements that is from a technology perspective, what do we need? What is required to achieve the business requirements? Having gathered all the business and technical requirements, we will then create a set of RF design requirements, also known as an RF specification, which is going to meet the gathered business and technical requirements.
Now, these RF design requirements will be the input into the design phase and will include things like a minimum received signal strength known as primary coverage. It may also include a required minimum signal strength required from a second AP, we call that secondary coverage. And secondary coverage helps to achieve the required cell overlap for roaming and can also provide AP redundancy. We might also include a requirement for a minimum signal to noise ratio or how much co-channel contention is acceptable.
Now following the define stage, we move into the design phase. In the design phase, we create a design to meet the gathered requirements. Now, there are many driven methodologies which can be used to create an RF design. But on this website, we will focus on techniques using RF modeling and AP on a stick validation. The output of the design phase is design documentation, and this will detail AP and antenna placements. And it may also include things like heat maps, bill of materials, and configuration recommendations.
Now, it is important to ensure that good and detailed documentation is fed into the next phase, which is deploy. You see, it’s essential to make sure the installation team has enough detailed information on location, mountain height, orientation of access points, and antennas. And it’s also important that they know what to do if running into any problems with one of the mountain locations, for example, maybe some reason they can mount the access point in the required location.
Now, as a design engineer, you may not always be involved in the physical installation of the access points and antennas, but you do need to be involved in enough in this process to ensure that they’re installed correctly as part of the design. And we also need to ensure that the wireless LAN configuration matches the design and will meet the customer’s requirements.
Now, following the installation and configuration, the final part of the deploy phase is going to be validating the deployment, and this will typically involve some sort of validation survey, which may also involve application and roaming testing. Following the validation, any recommended optimizations should be included and validate before the deployment is signed off.
And finally, we come to the diagnose phase. Now, diagnose is something which we do to an existing wireless network. We are assessing the design of an existing network to see if it meets the current requirements. Very often, wireless LAN design begins here. We first diagnose an existing network to determine if it’s meeting the current requirements and then make any recommendations, which might be just to add a few additional access points or maybe a full new design is required.
So, that concludes a high-level overview of our four wireless LAN design phases, define, design, deploy, and diagnose. To explore each of these phases in more details and for more in-depth videos, you can click off on any of the four phases in the graphics below. Thank you for watching. Goodbye.
