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Easing WLAN management pain: paving the way for rapid rollouts.

Article Excerpt
WLAN deployment is still in its relative infancy in terms of broad organizational rollouts, but WLAN administrators are already listing management complexity as one of their top headaches.

Despite elegant management software interfaces and tools for automating site surveys, most WLANs in use today require ongoing manual intervention to optimize AP configurations for traffic mix, user density, and other variables. The fundamental problems are the limited bandwidth that must be shared across the WLAN, and the variable nature of RF signals and their susceptibility to interference and performance degradation.

Under the current conditions, WLAN management seems to be more black magic than science. But it doesn't have to be. When WLAN architecture is designed from the ground up to accommodate and simplify issues that are specific to wireless transmission, WLAN management can be much simpler.

LAN Management Assumptions Don't Address WLAN Issues

Current WLAN architectures and their management techniques have been largely driven by experience with wired LAN management. This "wire-centric" view lies at the heart of the problem with today's WLAN management.

First, the wired LAN world sees network management as a simplified model--Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security, or FCAPS. The FCAPS model allows companies to look at the most important parts of network management, and creates an easy way to audit the network and answer the question, "Am I covering all bases and thereby making management as easy as possible?"

In the case of wired networks, FCAPS is the right model, and the process of reviewing the management functions of a network against FCAPS...