Cisco CCNP Enterprise 300-425 ENWLSD – Wireless Enterprise Network Design Fundamentals

22. CH01-V21 Predictive Site Survey

And welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about predictive site survey. Predictive Site Survey is actually performed before you do the actual onsite site survey. o this is done before you do the actual site survey which can be passive or active and this is done by using the data that is retrieved from the customer. And the main purpose of Predictive Site Survey is checking the coverage and performance if you use certain type of access points. So you cannot know the actual environmental factors and you cannot see the real onsite situation.

And this is done to visualize network coverage. Which areas can be covered if you use certain access points in certain locations and we actually do it to estimate the number and placement of your access points as many actual real time environmental factors are not taken into account and you cannot also know them just by going through the floor plan. You will need to do some changes after you do the Predictive size array because the actual one will show you will give you a much better picture. o when should we prefer predictive site survey?

This is suitable for new buildings and this is for the times when you want to check whether you need to get additional access points for your design and you just want to see the overall picture of your design. But of course there are risks because you don’t do it on the actual side. If you only use Predictive Size Survey you might need to buy additional access points. You might have bought more access points than necessary and you might even have areas without proper signal coverage. Why? Because maybe you thought about adding a new access point here, but those walls are soil’s, concrete walls instead of having doors like this.

So you might have less signal down below here. So maybe you need, you will need to put the access point inside the room or in between those two rooms. So you might need to do some changes when you do the actual one. But this will give you a pretty good picture of what will be the final result and you can even evolve your design starting with Predictive Site Survey. Then go to actual redeployment or post deployment active or passive site surveys so that you will have a pretty good estimate and predict the size and scope of the project. With the Predictive Size Survey, for example, you came up with 500 APS and you will give a number like let’s say 10%. So 10% is 50 APS and you will get the customer by 550 APS.

It is always a good estimate to buy more than necessary because just going through the limits, just going near the limits, for example, buying 500 access points might not be enough for all spaces, for all environments that might have some irregularities in them. So this is what Predictive Site Survey is all about and we will also of course talk about and see how to put access points in how to put those doors and walls in. So no worries in there. But this is just an overview about predictive site survey and what it will bring us. What will be the risks. Thanks.

23. CH01-V22 Passive and Active Site Surveys

Hello and welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson, we will talk about passive and active side surveys. So, we have two different options for site surveys. Why? Because one is interested in the signal strength based on broadcast management traffic, and the other one is interested in coverage and performance on the password. One, the survey device passively scanned the RF environment and it just deals with not broadcast broadcast management frames. And it measures the broadcast management frame signal string, but it doesn’t care about the wireless and performance characteristics.

However, in the active site survey, it measures data frame signal strength and the survey device associates to the wireless access point to do some measurements for signal strength noise, which is for snr and also some bidirectional performance characteristics. So why do we perform passive site survey? It is performed when the survey device or the client device passively scans RF environment. And this is to detect all the access points that are operating within the range and to measure their received signal strength, noise and some other signal parameters. But this is not, again I’m repeating, this is not about wireless and performances. On the Pesticide survey, the survey device performs channel scanning or across multiple channels. And you see some access points such as this one, this one, or like this one.

And if there were another access point here, we would also hear that one and we wouldn’t be connecting to that, but we would hear the broadcast management frames for this access point. Whether this is a rogue one, whether this is a normal one, we would see it on the output of our site survey. And you do the passive site surveys to give the customer some signal strength assessment. And this is again just for the broadcast management traffic.

For the active site survey, you measure data frame signal strength, not the management one. So you associate to an access point, you measure the signal strength, you measure the noise and some bi directional parameters and all those measurements are recorded. And with the help of them, you will get some actual performance parameters. You need active size surveys to reflect the coverage and performance characteristics of your client device type.

So if you are using a laptop and if you are using, for example, wireless and adapter, you can use this and select the active part. You can do both. And what we call this mode is hybrid. So in the hybrid mode, hybrid side survey, you do the Pesticide Survey and active site Survey all together. So in our site surveys, we can choose two different modes, modes which are passive and active, and we can also choose both to come up with a hybrid site survey. Thank you for watching.

24. CH01-V23 Site Survey Deliverables

And welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about site survey deliverables. So we learned different types of site surveys and of course you will learn how to do them in separate videos, but accept the fact that you completed this site survey. Now what will you deliver the customer? Before doing the site survey you need to give the customer a statement of work which we also called as sow. And this will give sort of a protection for the surveyor and the customer and it will be like a contract between the customer and the surveyor. And you will also give the customer questionnaire. This will complement the statement of work and it will have some additional information. After the site survey you will give the customer the site survey report.

It will be something like that, you will have the customer name, the site and some other information and you will give just brief information related to the site survey where you have completed that, how many access points you face. With some things like that, I just blackened them out. Just not to give you the customer name but this is from an actual size survey. Of course I have many different pages of different maps and of course I have different things that are written about the site survey that I completed, how many access points I had on a specific floor, how many I had needed. And this is another result after we deploy another access point here.

So these are the same floors but there were only one access point, this was a brownfield upgrade and when they put another access point here, which is this one, now as you can see the coverage was higher, but again we didn’t have any coverage here. These rooms were used for storage, but in the report it was specifically mentioned. Of course the names of the rooms are written here and here and in the report it was specifically mentioned that in these rooms we didn’t have coverage, in this balcony we didn’t have coverage. So if you want to have coverage, you will need to do this and that, maybe add another mapping, use predictive size survey and put another access point here so that they will be able to see what they are missing for.

Also in the report you need to talk about some improvements, improvement suggestions, and of course you need to talk about which channels the access points should be in, if there are any constraints in that, or if there aren’t any constraints in that, you should also specify that. So you should treat the size to report as this. If somebody reads it, if somebody sees the report as a whole, then they will be able to understand the WiFi characteristics in that building, in that floor. So as you can see here, the surveyor just followed some footsteps. So you can see that he continued some continuous site survey or maybe he used a step by step survey. You will see the differences between them and how you can do it under a Kahu site survey software.

But now we are talking about site surreport and on the report you need to mention some specifics. You need to give an in depth view of the WiFi characteristics before the deployment and after the deployment. If this is a post deployment site survey and if this one is a pre deployment and in the report you need to specify all that because just like I mentioned, the customer needs to understand what was happening before what is happening now. Or if this one is not a post site survey, but if this one is a predictive one, and if you are saying that you need to put access points here and here, then you should also mention that. Because when this customer sees it like this one, they will think like, okay, I don’t have a problem. I’m not having WiFi in the store room and I don’t care about it.

They can say that. You need to specify which access points you use, what is the AP model, what are the channels you use, what is the band you are using. You need to all mentioned, you need to mention all of that and of course you don’t have coverage here. You don’t have coverage here. Are those places negligible? Or maybe you need to add another access point. You need to mention all the details that you propose so that the customer will have a detailed view of what is happening and what will happen after the deployment. So this was all about size server deliverables. Thank you for watching.

25. CH01-V24 Mesh Network Design

And welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about mesh network design. So before talking about the design of something, we should first understand what it is all about. Mesh topology is where your devices are all connected to each other. So there are many redundant connections. And maybe this one is connected to this one. This one is. This one is connected to this one. So all of them are connected to each other in all possible ways and a mesh network actually is decentralized and it is not an expensive one like the one that you use a wires and controller or the one that you use different cabling, many ports. Not like that. It is pretty cheap because all the access points need to transmit just to reach to the other one. So this is covered area. This is this one’s coverage area. So another coverage area for the blue one. Now you know the picture, right? So let’s clear our screen and talk about more then what about the wireless mesh networks? The wireless mesh networks are actually formed between APS through the air, through the radio links between them and all they need to do is get into their coverage area.

 So this one connects to this one, this one connects to this one and this one connects to both of these. Maybe it doesn’t even have to connect to this one. Just connecting to left access point and right access point will be sufficient maybe just being connected to the left one will be sufficient for that. And this one will come from the above access point. So you will have many possible paths from a given access point to another one. And that path that the access point takes through the mesh network can change in response to traffic loads, radio connections or some traffic prioritization. And you can also cover more distance by using some nodes that are not connected to the wired network. And of course, why do you use mesh networks?

You use mesh networks because you cannot put go and put an Ethernet cable to this access point it just gets power from somewhere but it doesn’t but you don’t have to put an Ethernet cable and plug it into the switch because maybe this distance is more than 100 meters. So you will not have watch connection but what you do is you will get some sort of wireless connection to this access point and this access point will be connected to our switch and due to that, we have two components for our mesh network root access point and mesh access point. These ones are all root access points sorry, mesh access points. And this one is the root because it is connecting, it is getting the connection to the wired network and this route access point just uses the backhole connection backhoe wireless interface to communicate with its neighboring mesh access points. And if your access point is connected to the wired network. It will try to be a root access point rap. And for the mesh access points, we can have power connect.

We can provide power connection in three different forms. We can provide it over the cable, we can provide it through an AC to DC adapter or we can provide it via a power Ethernet injector these are huge boxes that will give power to our access point. Of course, this one just can be a Poe power PE cable. And as mesh access points have no wired connection to your Cisco wires and controllers, I’m talking about these three, not the root AP. They will be complete the wires and they will support clients that are communicating with other maps or other root access points or they can even be wired. And they can serve as a bridge to a remote wired network. So we can have an Ethernet cable to an old PC that will have a tower unit like this one, that will have a keyboard, a nice cabled mouse.

So you will get the PC connected to the mesh access point because this doesn’t support wireless, so no support of wireless and this will be connected to the root AP via wireless. Then it will get connected to the switch, then connected to either the Internet or the VLC. So you will have the VLC here. So what we call this one is a bridge. This is a bridge mesh access point. You can even connect a camera here, so you will even be connecting a camera here, so you can configure this port to be configured for any peripheral devices. And the last thing that you need to know about mesh network design is that how this mesh access point finds its way. How does it go understand to go from here to here or from here to here? It uses a protocol called Awpp. It is called as Awpp and the long name is adaptive Wireless Pad Protocol. It is a Cisco proprietary protocol and with the help of that, the traffic from the mesh AP to the root AP is found in terms of bestpad determination. So this is how your mesh network designs are done and how they are useful for your connectivity purposes.

26. CH01-V25 High Density Network Design Need

And welcome to our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about high density network design. So in our network, in our current networks, we have many users, we have high counterparties devices and more devices per user. We will have our phones, we will have our laptops, we will have our tablets. So maybe in the book you have our tablets, we have some conference rooms, some auditoriums, some classes that many students are in and we will have many people in that conference room dealing with their computers and each of them have their cell phones in their pockets, maybe tablets in their bags. So we will have many different devices per user.

So that’s why we need to have a high density network design. We will talk about it more in the upcoming videos but for the purpose of talking about high density network designs, we need to understand what are the requirements we need to understand the requirements in this video. Talk about the design in the upcoming chapters. So actually the title should be our Network design need. Why do we need it? Because of Bring your own device. Everybody now is just now bringing their own device from home. So you have their phones, laptops, tablets, they have some badges that can have some RFID tags and we have a high density of those users.

They are not just moving around and we don’t have hundred users in a campus, we have tens of thousands of users in a campus. We have 100 users with three devices in a conference room. So we need to think about this situation as this is getting the norm day by day. So to answer the question of why we need high density wireless design, we need it because it is getting the new norm, it is getting the situation that we cannot live without wireless and more and more users in large numbers are gathering in certain spaces and they want to use their wireless devices.

There are a couple of wireless devices with a good coverage on the same. If you are seeing many users going online using different devices and if you see many different WiFi beacons per location on a certain location, then you need to go and do a high density network design. That’s why you will need it. So this video was all about high density network network design need.

27. CH01-V26 Security Sensitive Network Design Need

Our new lesson. In this lesson we will talk about the security sensitive network design need. So our wireless devices have some sympathy capabilities and they can use drop on voice traffic, data traffic, video traffic and even we can use a wireless network to the point as the point of entry if you want to capture such data. And once you have established some basic wireless operations, you need to secure that network and security needs for you to understand certain parameters and you need to be able to go against some challenges for a wireless network.

So you need to secure RF space, you need to secure your SSIDs and to secure all that, you need to have a sort of a way to get user distinction. So which are the ones that want to connect to your network, your users? And who are the ones that are connected to your network, not your users. So you need to understand the ones that are legal users that can connect, and malicious users.

So you need to do this distinction. You need to understand the traffic flows, so you need to understand which wireless lens can reach which networks and what kind of privacy you will provide for your users on each wireless end and how you will prevent or maybe you will allow users on the same wireless end to connect to each other.

Or not. And you need to also think about the multicast and broadcast traffic, how can you protect that? And you need to identify your users. So identity based network design is a must for the purpose of even for the sole purpose of security. You need to think about some traffic patterns and some breeding methods that can happen on your wireless network. For example, a Bluetooth device and a wireless device, a Bluetooth adapter actually, and a wireless adapter on your laptop may act as a bridge and allowed an unwanted user onto your wireless end.

You can have some non WiFi role to get some sort of a security hole into your network and you need to be able to detect and eliminate such threats, such different non WiFi rogues and you need to find whether any sensitive data is leaking to an outside source. So you need to understand the traffic flows. You need to follow some packets. You need to be very aware for your wireless threads. So you can have some rogue access points on your network. You can have some adult networks. You can be faced with different wireless attacks such as Management Frame Spoofing. You can face with client disassociation, some dedicated acts, and maybe you can even face with a perpetrator who wants to interact with your network and steal some of your data.

And you will also have some additional concerns for the security of your wireless end. So to eliminate such threats and to get some security measurements for your network, you need to apply some wireless policies, you need to get some restrictions on the devices that are supported in your network. You need to maybe think about better allowing BYOD in your network so maybe will you allow any person to bring their own devices? They can have some viruses already on their devices, they could have coded such viruses in their home environment in even in certain coffee shops.

You need to have device visibility, you need to protect some sensitive data and use sort of methods that will not allow certain sensitive data to leak outside of your network, outside of your device. You need to be able to control the access on your wireless medium, so you can revoke access to your wireless medium, you can control who is connecting to your medium, with which device, from there, what kind of posture mechanisms they will have, what will be the access method. And you also need to be able to identify users and allow sorting users in certain departments to sort of networks and just revoke access for some other users.

For example, the famous example in those traditions is this you shouldn’t allow a user or a computer science major, the guy who works, who writes the code, they shouldn’t be allowed on the finance subnet, they shouldn’t be allowed to go to finance servers, they shouldn’t be connected to that on the wireless medium. It is almost the same for the wired medium. So everybody should have their own permissions, their own policies. Of course, you cannot just police every single person, but you can apply policies department based. You can control the accesses in terms of devices used, locations that the user accesses the certain data.

So you need to be able to control all that. And we have some certain devices such as Ice, we have mobility services engine for threads and we need to be able to securely manage our devices. We need to do some integrations between prime and MSC and see the location of the devices. So all of those parameters need to be considered to get a security sensitive network design on your wireless. And in this video we talked about many different things. Let it with certain security threads related with sort parameters that you need to look for such as user distinction, traffic flows and you need to also be aware of wireless threads on your wireless medium and you need to be able to mitigate them. So this was all about secure sensitive network designed.