IEEE 802.11g Radio Coverage Study for Indoor Wireless Network Redesign

Abstract

An efficient wireless design and development is essential to ensure a good performance of the WLANs. It supposes a good estimation of the number of APs, their locations according to the structure of the building, a good channel distribution and an adequate level of transmission power in order to avoid overlapping but providing the largest coverage. Otherwise, a WLAN may be composed by more access points, so it may be more expensive, but with a worse function due to the radio overlapping among APs in the same channel. In this paper, we show how a WLAN can be redesigned in order to improve its wireless coverage and function. It is based on studying the distribution and features of a public building in a Spanish University in order to determine the optimum access point location and to assign the appropriated channel. In this case, this WLAN allows users to connect to one of the available SSIDs in the target building. Results obtained from the proposed redesign have been very successful from the point of view of performance and coverage.