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Designing your Wi-Fi future

Editorial Type: Feature     Date: 11-2015    Views: 1466   





Wi-Fi access has become a utility to its users, but work is needed. Perry Correll, Principal Technologist at Xirrus explains how to design in what is required

Wireless connections have already overtaken wired connections as the primary choice for network access and over 60 per cent of global Internet traffic is carried over Wi-Fi. The growth in adoption of mobile devices predicts that 4.9 billion wireless-connected 'things' will saturate the market by the end of 2015, increasing to 25 billion by 2020. User expectations for Wi-Fi networks are simultaneously increasing, and this, along with the increased volume of application traffic, has already severely stressed existing Wi-Fi networks, making the engineer's job of planning a scalable, future-proof network more challenging than ever.

Network engineers and designers face the challenge of designing a network that will support customer requirements in the age of the Internet of things (IoT) and BYOD. Just a few years ago engineers mainly designed Wi-Fi networks for laptops, but now smartphones, tablets and even smaller mobile devices such as watches, cameras and activity trackers outnumber Wi-Fi laptop connections.

BANDWIDTH DILEMMAS
According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, 6.5 million Wi-Fi devices are shipped to consumers worldwide each day. A typical user has 40 to 100 applications per device and this means that increasing capacity demands are inevitable.

If a static system is deployed, the network's longevity is significantly limited and an upgrade will be required a lot sooner than is ideal. The trouble is that many Wi-Fi vendors still propose deployments of Access Points (APs) with a fixed dual-band design. This limits 50 per cent of the radios to operate in the 2.4 GHz band, when at the same time the majority of new devices support the 5 GHz band. In fact, research commissioned by the Wi-Fi Alliance shows that in the next five years, 5 GHz usage will be close to 100 per cent saturation, which will requires a higher percentage of 5 GHz radios. Herein lies the dilemma - how do you meet today's requirements and scale and plan for the future?

Software-defined radios allow IT administrators to quickly migrate their AP radios from 2.4 GHz to 5 GHz to match the actual mix of devices on their network. For example, at a recent education conference, 93 per cent of delegates operated in the 5 GHz band, leaving only 7 per cent using 2.4 GHz. With a typical Wi-Fi solution, this meant that 93 per cent of delegates used 50 per cent of radio capacity, while the remaining 7 per cent used the remainder, which does nothing to optimise the Wi-Fi network.

Additionally, APs with more than just two radios are strongly recommended for higher density locations, ideally including radios that can not only detect the speeds of various devices, but that can also intelligently group them by capabilities; a combination which optimises overall network operation.

THE FUTURE IS HERE
Proper network design is critical. Demands on the network continue to grow - the number of connected devices, the volume of applications and bandwidth demand - with no end in sight. There is not a one-size fits all approach when designing a Wi-Fi solution and the days when the Wi-Fi market was defined only by speed, cost and coverage are long gone. The issues now are capacity, density, efficiency and the ability to handle dense client environments.

Today's Wi-Fi network needs to be versatile and robust, but also simple and cost-effective. The fact is that networks need more 5 GHz radios, not just more APs to address these changes: it's as easy as that. The vast majority of new devices support 5 GHz so it makes sense to design more 5 GHz radios into Wi-Fi infrastructure. A good Wi-Fi network does much more than connect users - it becomes an integral part of the experience. NC

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