WLAN planning tool: a techno-economic perspective

• Autor(a) principal: Sebastião, Pedro
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Outros Autores: Tomé, Ricardo, Velez, Fernando J., Grilo, António, Cercas, Francisco, Robalo, Daniel, Rodrigues, António, Varela, Frederico F.
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/14348
• topic: WLAN; Planning tool; Techno-economic; Access Point

A simple wireless local area network (WLAN) planning tool was developed to optimize the position and number of access points (APs), as well as the total cost of the required equipment, according to different WLAN suppliers, in indoor and outdoor environments. This planning tool can be distinguished in two mains scopes: technical (defining the number and position of APs) and economic (generating a budget according to all planned equipment and its suppliers). The proposed planning tool enables manual and automatic planning modes. It only needs some inputs, like the digital format of the floor plan, the obstacle types and their positions, the areas to be covered, the user’s most probable position and the applications used by them. The propagation model used in this tool was validated using experimental results for some scenarios. In the manual mode, the APs positions are defined by the network designer. The output of the tool is the received power or the throughput, depending on the chosen option. However, in the automatic mode the tool defines the AP position and minimizes the total amount of APs in a given area. For the implementation of the latter mode, two hot spots position planning algorithms were developed and implemented; they depend on the values of the received power or throughput, while guaranteeing the total coverage or service supply for all users, respectively. This tool also provides an estimation of the budget for the required implementation, and can avoid several days of tedious site-survey work. Except for the lowest distances, experimental values for the received power generally agree with the DP model for the range of distances considered, from the terminal station to the AP, both for outdoor and indoor environments. The differences near the AP are due to different antenna radiation patterns between the tool (omnidirectional isotropic) and the experimental setup (dipole antenna). In the indoor paths, the slight differences between the results of two floors may be due to the interaction of the direct ray with the floor direction itself.