Cisco CCNP Enterprise 300-425 ENWLSD – Site Survey For Wireless Designs

1. CH03-V01 Pre-Site Survey Checklist

Hello and welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about press site survey checklist. This is like a questionnaire and it should contain some of the valuable information that you need to get from the customer before you even start your press site survey work. So what you should start with, you should start with the contact information of the customer, the customer name, address, phone number and most preferably their email address. And then you should understand what will be the extent of your wild site survey. So you should understand the number of sites because you will go each of them and do the site survey and then you should understand how many buildings are there in the site survey for those sites. So if there are ten buildings you will go each of them one by one and you should get the addresses for those buildings.

So you won’t be just going through Google Maps and trying to find every building and just address and number of size will not be enough for you. You should understand the square footage and how much they are, how big they are and also you should understand the operation schedule so you will be able to get there in time and complete the site survey in the operational time because you won’t be around there when no one is around there. All right, you should be there on the operational hours because you will be able to understand the interference sources better because nobody will open a microwave after hours, right? And also you should take into account that in certain situations you need to be doing the site survey out of operational schedule, so that’s why you need to know it.

 For example retail stores, the customer will not want you to go around with a computer during customers that are trying to buy some stuff. So you should do it out of the operational schedule. But for a company that you will have employees going around and as stable situation not open to customers. You need to do it in the operational schedule in the times that the stores are that the company is open and how many users that you will need for the correct operation so that you’ll be able to understand how many users you need for that wireless end. Then you will get to determine the access point density. If you know all that information, you should also understand the application requirements, what will be the most used applications in that situation, and even determining the average packet size for the application would be perfect. You should also go on with some RF coverage information and that should be related with how much coverage you will need on the inside of the building, how much coverage you will need outside areas, and you need to understand what will be the application to be used. Also what will be the encryptions that will be used for the RF coverage for your wild sins and how much utilization you will get approximately.

That should also be important. And then you should go over the existing infrastructure, what is already in there, what is the existing topology, and how much speed you have in each network port. That’s important. You should understand whether the cabling is fiber or whether it is copper. If it is copper, then you need to understand the type of the copper cabling category five, six, what is it? And for some specific impress structures, for some specific building, you should also take notice of the ceiling heights, whether they are too high or not. And you should also understand whether it’s a warehouse or not, whether there are any racking shelling that will be creating some interference for your RF environment, that will be creating some Attorney General reflection. And will you be able to go around all the areas? Is this a hazardous area?

Whether you will need some form of protection, whether you will need some hard head, any safety glasses, or whether you need to be protecting yourself against anything related with your health. And of course, when you are talking about buildings, you should also take into notice the access operations, whether you need anybody with you during the site survey, because some companies, some certain businesses need you need somebody to escort you and they will not give you the badges that will be required for going around the area. So you will be needing a special person going around with you with the help of getting you around places that you will need a special badge to enter. So in your precise survey survey checklist, you will need to get all this information so that you need to minimize the surprises that you will face in the actual site survey. So thank you for watching.

2. CH03-V02 Pre-Deployment Site Survey

Hello and welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about pre deployment site survey. So pre deployment site survey is about getting information from your predictive site survey and then transitioning that predictive analysis to the actual deployment and configuration of your real devices. So what you will do in this spread deployment site survey is going to be you will install some access points which will be temporary. You will walk around the site, take some RF measurements, then for some problematic areas, you’ll need to reposition access points and retest them. So basically you will walk through and get some readings for your RF environment. And you need to have some goals for this deployment site survey, right? So what are those goals?

The first goal is to get appropriate coverage and also you need to get some proper coverage for client roaming. So just getting coverage will not be enough. You need to also consider the client roaming. You need to understand what will be the tricky situations, what will be the areas that can create some issues for you. So you need to identify sources of RF interference that can affect wildlife and performance. You need to get hold of three qualities, three features. You need to check for coverage, you need to check for interference, and you also need to check for roaming for your coverage of RF environment. So when you start your pre deployment site survey, you need to start edge of the coverage area and continue through the site. So you will take measurements in order to evaluate coverage.

And you need to understand whether you are getting the desired RSSI and Snr values. You need to also document the path that you take and you can do it easily with, for example, ECAHO. So if this is your area for site survey, I’ll just try to give you a basic understanding for it. So maybe these are the holes that you will go through. And if you start here on the ecosystem survey, you will click here, click here.

And then after so many clicks and getting through the area, you will understand what kind of RSSI value on this spot, what kind of RSSI and of course Snr value in this spot. So the software will take all this information and give you some nice visible maps. And of course you will have some problematic areas such that you will not have necessary coverage in that area.

And for that you need to reposition your access points. You need to, for example, use different antennas, whether the building has a high ceiling or the holes, the holes are very long from end to end. So you need to change your access points, use different antennas, and retest the whole thing again. And just using sensor software will not be enough for you because you also need to depend on some spectrum analysis. And with that you can use a baseline. You can establish a baseline for your RF noise floor and from there you can understand the Snr better because as you know what Snr is that you will have a noise floor like this one, and your RSSI value will be like this. And in between you will have your Snr. So signal to noise ratio, you need to measure the signal, you need to understand noise and you need to get the Snr value.

With the help of the software, you will also see the term AP on a stick for these redeployment site surveys because you will basically put some access points on some six and you will have a power supply, you will have some measurements, you will get some measurements with your maybe laptop. So you will just get your laptop disconnected from here and get the measurements here, get a measurement around here, so you will get all those measurements and put them into your software and understand what is going on.

So access point analyst is literally an access point that will be sucked. So in the pre deployment site survey, our purpose is getting the predictive site survey information and trans missioning it to actual deployment and configuration of access points. And you need to check for treating just like we said, coverage, interference and roaming. Thanks.

3. CH03-V03 Site-Survey For Coverage.

And welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about site survey for coverage and also why we need site survey. In a wireless network you can have many different problems and one of them is having poor quality of signal, the other one could be not having proper mobility so that your clients will not roam properly and you can also have insufficient coverage in certain areas. And to understand how your wireless design will be in the actual deployment, you need to do a site survey so that you will be able to improve your planning and or also your design. And in that site survey you need to take into account certain features, you need to understand the customer requirements for that specific building or site, you need to have proper WiFi coverage, you need to be able to get the clients shown properly and also you need to get sufficient coverage even for the problematic areas.

And now we will focus on the coverage part. For the coverage part you need to get an RF signal boundary. How can you do that? You can do that for example in a certain building plan, let me just drove it basically you can place an access point on here so that you will try to get the coverage around this area okay? And you will get how much coverage you are having around the borders of that area. So how much are SSI value here?

 How much snr again the same for here, the same here here and you need to get a boundary for your data intended data rate for example how much data rate you need here? Eleven megabits, maybe 24 megabits how much you need to specify that beforehand and then you need to do the site survey according to those parameters that you have decided beforehand.

You will see the coverage, how much coverage you will have and if you don’t have the proper coverage at this location, then you need to change the access point position, you need to change the antenna maybe and you need to do the steps again and again. So you need to get the proper coverage and you need to be able to verify that proper coverage in each step. So verifying coverage measurements is another important factor. And what you will need in this seizure for coverage, you will need some access points because you will need, for example, you will put an access point here, maybe an AP here, and you will get the coverage here so that you will see whether you are roaming properly or not. Maybe another one here. So you are getting what we are talking about right?

You’re getting that you will have roaming areas here and whether you are having the proper roaming in place and you will also need some clients for that to happen. Of course while you are traveling all those areas you need to have a spectrum analyzer software such as Ekahu which is a very good one installed onto your computer or to your laptop, and you need to get the necessary measurements from there.

So at the end of Ekahu output, from the Caw output, you’ll be able to get some proper maps, and from those proper maps, you will be able to understand what is going on, and you will also be able to get them into your own document. It will also show you what are those maps. So in your site survey for coverage, you need to care about the RF signal boundaries, and you need to get some measurements related with that. Also, you need to use x points clients and spectrum analyzer software as the minimum requirements for your site survey for coverage. Thank you for.

4. CH03-V04 Site-Survey For Different Environments

And welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about site survey for different environments. So you are doing many site surveys and each of them is a different challenge for you. Why? Because you will face with many different environments. The first one that you can have challenges regarding the site survey and design will be open spaces and the most important one is the courtyard yard or any bathroom’s because you will have many different access points from the courtyards because you will have access points in each room. You will have access points in holes, and you will get some interference from those access points in those rooms, in those holes.

And you need to get access points as far as away from those atrium or courtyard places and you need to have a couple of access points just to COVID that place, just to COVID that open space with those access points. And another challenging design or another challenging place for site surveys are conference rooms. Conference rooms have access points in the ceiling and they will have some directional antennas. And because of that, access points will be honored for and you will get very low power from them. And you will also have many people in those conference rooms and you will need high utilizations, you will need more access points in those specific conference rooms.

 And when you need more access points, that means you will have a challenge designing them to put them into the right place. Because you will have access points that can create interference for each other, you will need to design them for the channels they use and for the coverage and transmit power they will emit. But you should also take into consideration that as they will be under floors, you will have low power emitted from them. So you need to simulate the same environment for your site survey and that will be creating a challenge for you. Another thing is you will have some places that will have so much high healings, high ceilings and of course not healings and high ceilings and those will have issues to create some coverage for the floor areas. Because think about places like this, this is a normal conference room. So you will have tables, you will have some chairs and you will have access points here, so it will give you some coverage for you and for colleagues.

But what if the same room had a higher ceiling? So you will have an access point here, but it will need to reach too much higher places, it will need to have too much power to be able to reach you on your own desk and to be able to create enough coverage. So what happens is that you will need a much narrower beam. So for example, if you have an omnidirectional antenna, you will have some difficulty providing sufficient coverage. But if you had some beam antennas, and if you get coverage like this. So you will be able to create some narrow coverage beams, and that will be related with your beam angle.

But you will have sufficient coverage although the ceiling is higher than the normal length. Okay? So for those environments, you need to have antennas for high directional, high gain directional patches, orgAS style MIMO antennas, and because they will have better ceiling to floor coverage, and you will be able to provide a narrower beam with those antennas. And you will get coverage in such certain high ceiling places.

You need to be able to use some external antennas. So the access points should be chosen such that you will be able to use external antennas with them. And internal antennas will not work in such challenging situations. So you need to choose your access points accordingly. So in this video, we talked about site survey for different environments. We could also say site survey for difficult environments. And we talked about open spaces and high ceilings. Thank you for watching.

5. CH03-V05 Site-Survey For Roaming

Hello and welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about site survey for roaming. So if you make a design for seamless roaming, which will be the main goal for our site surveys and for our network designs for wireless, you need to consider the access point placements in such a way that if roaming happens. You need to get all your access points on a pad and you need to get them connected or registered to the same controller. Why? Because you will have minimum intercontroller roaming and if you have a wireless design this should be one of the concerns for you to understand better and for you to implement better in your design. Because for example if this AP is different, is registered to a different controller, then a regular employee while trying to go and get a cup of tea from here needs to go to another controller, do roaming and when he gets he or she gets back to their office they need to roam back to the other controller.

So you will have two intercontroller roaming just because he wanted to have a cup of tea. Okay, so fast roaming, seamless roaming and minimum intercontrolled roaming should be your concerns. You should also consider access point placements such that you will have coverage and coverage overlap actually for all possible client paths.

For example, let’s look at our example in here you will see that if one person comes here, goes to the other corner, then they will not have any problem for the coverage. But what happens if they go to the stairway? They will be out of the coverage. And what happens if they go into this storage room and go to the end of here? They will be out of the coverage. You need to consider such that there will be overlaps here. So for example, if you had another AP here then you will have coverage for this area also. So you will have big coverage through this stairs.

Maybe you would need this access point to be placed in here so that you will have coverage like this one but you will have better coverage here, especially better than nothing and it would cover these stairwells as well. So you need to consider your design to have better access point placement so that you will have better cell coverage overlap and you need to consider all client pets, whether those are stairwells, whether those are some storage rooms and you also need to minimize intercontrolled roaming in your design. And how could we do that? We can get all our access points on a sort client pad to be connected to be registered to the same controller. Thank you for watching.

6. CH03-V06 Site-Survey Tools

Welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about site survey tools or side survey devices. So as a hardware you will need to be operating with some of the specialized adapters and you can use them for site survey, spectrum analysis and also for packet captures. These are special adapters that are tuned for this specific role and there are some differences in them versus the normal wireless and client adapters. And for example the side server adapters, they are designed to listen to passively or actively communicate on the WiFi networks and they also record some detailed results and they are capable of operating like a normal wires and client, but they are also tuned to allow greater sensitivity and they can provide better survey results. And also you need more than one adapter. So you need to be able to support multiple adapters for your site surveys.

For example, you can use this one, the Adamax ACU 120. This is a pretty good adapter, not the most expensive one. And you can also use Proxim, you can use Eco Naked 300 if you can find any at your local electronic store. You can also use some sort of adapters for Netgear and Proxim is the one that is the most used ones and you can also support it. They are also supported with Echo Side Survey and Air Magnet Side Survey. So you can use it for both. Let me write it down or even Adamax will do your job. And you will also have some adapters for your spectrum analyzers purposes.

And what those adapters do is that there are some specialized hardware so they get the Detective signals and use for your transform for them so that they will be able to represent the signal in two dimensions. And you can also check frequency versus channel notification and some other parameters that you will need for your spectrum analyzer software. And this actually is not a requirement for your spectrum analyzes, but if you use special spectrum analyzer adapters you will get a better result.

But some software even let you to use adapters on your laptops, on your phones, so you will be even done with the default adapters on your phones or laptops, but using specialized devices will get you a better result. And also after spectrum lenses you can also deal with packet capture adapters. Those are special adapters that will be configured and to operate in a listen only mode like a monitor mode. And you can also define the channel that you want to monitor. So some examples are Omnipek Wild packets, River Bed, Air PCAP and with that you can capture 2011 frames and other frames will be considered as noise. And for your hardware needs you can deal with any software adapter, or any adapter or spectrum analysis adapter, packet capture adapters. But the important thing is that if you are using a special software, for example a site survey software, for example, for instance, ekahu. Then on the Ekahu website you will see the supported adapters. Supported Adapters for passive site Surveys supported Adapters for active site Surveys you will be able to use them properly at your own environment. So what you need to do is that just go and check the website for the software that will use that you will use whether it’s a spectral analysis software or site survey software and you will be able to select the proper adapter so you will get better results.

And also you will be working with adapters that are optimized for such software for such purpose. For example, you can use any adapter for side survey purposes, but if you want to use passive and active site surveys at the same time, then you will need specific adapters to be able to operate in certain requirements and to be able to operate with certain features that are available by your side survey software, such as a cahoo. So you need to consider that and use the proper equipment. So in this video we talked about site survey tools, whether it’s a hardware or software. Thank you for watching.