Indoor Wireless tool- surveyor

cisco_designer hath wroth:

Indoor:

Outdoor: I don't know of any tool that will automatically design your indoor wireless network for you based on an Autocad drawing. There are just too many uncontrolled variables, such as interference, furniture, and construction material for such a tool to work effectively indoors. However, for outdoors, there are some MatLab wi-fi simulations that might be usable.

For a good overview on wireless layout and deployment, see the archived "Intel Wireless HotSpot Deployment Guide" at:

Indoor:

Outdoor:

Hi Jeff,

have you already tested Ekahau ? It doesn't seem to work properly under indoor , office environment as topology generated by tracking software is subject to interference error, so a autocad like drawing seems to be a description of conception and not a real environment generated map

And for outdoor use there is need to use Matlab tools as a simple triangulation algorithm works perfectly. I am really surprised Ekahau doesn't go into details of indoor tracking showing marketing materials only. Of course there is reverse algorithm for discovering x,y,x position of each wifi sender/tag for a specific location and a number of wifi senders, but what you get is not necessary circular range/ signal level pictures as on the above picture. What is presented on the above picture is signal level aproximation for wifi network switching packets under best reception/signal level algorithms and has nothing to do with a real environment circumstances.

Darius

Well, if you call 15 minutes of tinkering with an early version to be testing, yes. I thought it was interesting, but not very useful for what we were trying to accomplish. What was funny was that we were "recording" the signal strength in the isles, which was adequate. However, the signal strengths only a short distance away, on the actual desktop where the laptops and PDA's were going to be used, was completely different. In order to do a proper test, we probably should have walked on everyones desk.

Interference will not show up on the map. The recorder only measures signal strength, not signal quality. If interference were measured, the map would look completely different. Also, there's quite a bit of frequecy selective fading in an indoor environment. This creates very small, but also very "deep", nulls and dead areas.

Well, how real do you want it to be? In this case, it's only a matter of accuracy, granularity, and number of recordings. If you want more reality, just take more measurements.

Such models do not take into consideration topography. I'm not sure I know what you mean by triangulation. I can locate a wi-fi client using triangulation using two access points, but this is a essentially a single access point model, with the access point repeated as required. What the OP apparently wants is a best effort guess as to the expected signal strengths for an indoor environment. Ekahau does that. He apparently also wants it to design and possibly optimize his network topology. It won't do that.

I suppose they don't want anyone to reverse engineer or clone the product, at least without first buying a copy.

What's an x,y,x ? Do you mean perhaps x, y, z ? I would be rather interested to know how you're going to get z axis (altitude) information from any number of access points, all in the same plane.

Yep. Reality varies with the observer.