Information Systems:Wireless infrastructure (WLAN) redesign implementation planning

Overview

The wireless project business case was approved June 2017. This is a page of notes regarding implementation. Other pages of interest related to this project are:

• Exploring a wireless redesign
• Current wireless infrastructure

Notes

• Antenna selection: The external variant of the 7532 AP will be purchased for the warehouse. RP-SMA antennas will need to be purchased - which types? omnidirectional/directional, gain etc.
• Mounting hardware: pole drops + a wooden board for the DC? Office would probably be better off just wall/ceiling mounted. Want to avoid mounting on the ceiling tiles since those are finicky
• POE injectors: single injectors or multi-port injectors depending on where the network cable terminates
• Test roaming on WPA2-PSK
• MobiControl deployment of WiFi profile to RF guns - test fallback to old (current) profile
• Configure Summit radio client on RF guns for optimal roaming - signal threshold (min RSSI), AP scanning interval

Site survey

I've decided it's best to do one. Wireless site surveys vary on the deliverables i.e. what exactly is included in the service. This is more of what we're looking for:

• Heatmap. We could have one done before (with the existing setup), after, or both. Doing one before really only serves to prove that the upgrade did improve things theoretically i.e. on paper. But we already know there are problems, so doing a heatmap should serve to optimize the new setup rather than justify the upgrade.

• Consultation. Some part of the quote will be 'consultation hours' so that we can ask questions related to mounting, channel configuration, signal strength. See Technical Questions section below.

Technical Questions

These are questions that should be answered

• Is it important to consider and configure client power limits?
• Related to the previous question, is the Auto setting for AP transmit power reliable? Or will these have to be custom-tuned and statically set according to the heatmap?
• Is one AP per office floor enough? What does the coverage map look like for 2.4GHz and 5Ghz?
• Should we plan for mostly 5GHz in the office? We need to shut off the 2.4GHz radios on as many APs as possible to prevent further interference, but we would not necessarily want to insist on the 5GHz band for something as trivial as guest wireless either.
• Is the new MU-MIMO technology worth considering? The APs we will be getting are traditional, single-user MIMO. MU-MIMO is part of the 802.11ac Wave 2 standard, which was ratified just recently. The 7532 is Wave 1. The reason for this question is that MU-MIMO is the first of all the new 802.11n and 802.11ac technologies that might actually benefit legacy clients (like the RF guns).
• How can you make the AP names permanent in the WiNG interface? They get reset upon a power cycle.
• What is the best way to implement controller redundancy? Do we simply mark another AP as a candidate to become controller? Can we test this once we get more APs?
• Does 802.11k and 802.11r affect legacy client performance? Is it worth turning these on to support newer devices on the guest network?
• Is OPMK relevant when using WPA2-PSK (keys instead of Enterprise authentication)?