Deployment Issues in Enterprise Wireless LANs

Although Wireless LANs market has grown tremendously in last few years, their enterprise deployments have been fairly limited. From manual site survey process to ensure signal coverage at all locations, to the well known security issues in original standards, there have been several deterrents to a widespread enterprise deployments of wireless LANs. In this paper we attempt to clarify three of the core deployment problems RF propagation modeling, access point positioning and cell dimensioning, and channel allocation. We illustrate how these problems are addressed in a typical process of deployment and classify various commercial tools available to aid the process. We also bring out the similarities of these issues with related deployment issues in cellular networking arena, and discuss various proposed solutions in both contexts. Finally, we propose several techniques for dynamic capacity optimization in wireless LANs.